Summary

In this chapter, we explored the skeleton of the glTF model and different methods of applying the vertex skin to the character model.

First, we created a tree structure for the skeleton. This step is required for the vertex skinning process, as we need the transformation matrices of the nodes to alter the vertex positions properly.

Next, we extracted all the data elements from the glTF file required to apply the vertex skinning. The CPU-based skinning was done to show the basic principle of the process. Then, we switched to GPU-based vertex skinning, moving the calculations from the processor to the vertex shader. Using the GPU instead of the CPU leads to a huge performance boost, as the massive parallel shader calculation is much faster than our single CPU core.

Finally, we added dual quaternion vertex skinning as a GPU skinning variant. Using dual quaternions enables a better, volume-retaining transformation behavior than linear blending. The dual quaternion approach...