SkinnedMesh

A skinned mesh is essentially a heirarchial model of bones with a mesh wrapped around them.

By using the skinning equation:

you can calculate the new position for each vertex. This results in a smooth animation similar to what you would find in a modern videogame.

Technologies

Used AssetImporter to import meshes from the Collada .dae format. In many cases Collada stores an object as several meshes so in order to render the entire object you have to loop through all the meshes. The objects can render in their bind pose, but because AssetImporter's documentaion is vague with regards to how the animations are stored, I was not able to correctly load all the animation matricies.

Using Sueda's Cheb mesh and animations I created a 3rd person camera perspective that follows the animated cheb around. Because I was unable to load my own animations, cheb's movement isnt as smooth as I would like from a skinned mesh animation.

By applying the same vertex calculations on the vertex normals you get new normals that correspond with the movement of the animation. This results in an accurate lighting model.