3D Mesh Processing and Character Animation

3D Mesh Processing and Character Animation focusses specifically on topics that are important in three-dimensional modelling, surface design and real-time character animation. It provides an in-depth coverage of data structures and popular methods used in geometry processing, keyframe and inverse kinematics animations and shader based processing of mesh objects. It also introduces two powerful and versatile libraries, OpenMesh and Assimp, and demonstrates their usefulness through implementations of a wide range of algorithms in mesh processing and character animation respectively. This Textbook is written for students at an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate level who are interested in the study and development of graphics algorithms for three-dimensional mesh modeling and analysis, and animations of rigged character models.

The key topics covered in the book are mesh data structures for processing adjacency queries, simplification and subdivision algorithms,mesh parameterization methods, 3D mesh morphing, skeletal animation, motion capture data, scene graphs, quaternions, inverse kinematics algorithms, OpenGL-4 tessellation and geometry shaders, geometry processing and terrain rendering. 

Author Biography

Ramakrishnan Mukundan is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.  Mukundan has both academic and industrial expertise in the field of Computer Graphics. He has been teaching Computer Graphics courses at undergraduate and graduate levels for the past twenty five years. He is the author of two books on computer graphics algorithms. He has also published several technical papers and supervised research projects in the field.