Advanced Animation with DirectX

Rating:
Summary: Outdated
Review: Advanced Animation with DirectX is not a good book at all. The author did a terrible job on the skinned animation parts and the later parts of the book is just plain bad. The beginning was ok but the code was not right. I tried to implement some of the stuff at the beginning and it didn't work. When I sat down and thought about the problem at hand and how to do it, I got everything working smoothly without using anything that was done is the book (which means the book was a waste of money). Who ever gave this book 5 out of 5 stars must be the author or a friend.

Rating:
Summary: My thoughts on this book.
Review: Advanced Animation with DirectX is not a good book at all. The author did a terrible job on the skinned animation parts and the later parts of the book is just plain bad. The beginning was ok but the code was not right. I tried to implement some of the stuff at the beginning and it didn't work. When I sat down and thought about the problem at hand and how to do it, I got everything working smoothly without using anything that was done is the book (which means the book was a waste of money). Who ever gave this book 5 out of 5 stars must be the author or a friend.

Rating:
Summary: Unbiased review
Review: First of all the retail price of the book is too much. The last section (video on texture and cloth simulation) which he thinks are the most advanced are just pretty lame. He could have better described how to export a skinned mesh better. The ragdoll effect as given is not combined with an animated model making it a bit less useful. The book does cover a lot on using skeletal animation that was definately not covered in other books that I've bought on the subject. I'm also glad that it has no intro to DX section. PS: Who wrote the 5 star review, the author?

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Summary: Take out the Advanced part and you have a good intro...
Review: Kind of a shame that this classifies as an "advanced" animation text for Direct3D these days... If you're interested in implementing slow animated textures or if you think skinning is considered advanced, I guess this is the right book for you. The "cloth" demo is also HORRIBLE. Look at Intel.com/IDS for real cloth simulation physics...

I gave it two stars because the facial animation system was great...

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book on Character Animation in DirectX9
Review: This is the best book, to my opinion, in the game development series, and probably the best character animation book on DirectX (the secondary best is the Programming Role Playing Game with Directx8). The first and the most important good thing on this book is that it concentrates on the advanced character animation techniques in DirectX9 rather than wasting half of the book talking about some basic things such as windows programming, DirectX and even C++. The book is only 500 pages, but containing lots of useful information and more importantly with decent working demo using D3DX library in DirectX9, not like most of the character animation books in the market, repeating lots of theory, and then with trivial, not re-useable code.

The contents of the books are excellent in terms of smooth blending of theory and programming practice using DirectX, especially parts concerning timing of animation, skeletal animation, real time animation blending, and even the physical simulation of rigid body animation. This book also presents other animation techniques such as facial animation and particle animation.

It will be useful if the book could talk about incorporation of simple forward/inverse kinematics techniques for the character to achieve the "object grasping" scenario, which should not be too far away from the level that the book has reached, as good materials have been presented on how to control and update the transformation matrices of hierarchical skeletal-based character animation.

In a word, this is an excellent book for anybody will like to know the techniques for character animation in DirectX.