forge-skinning-animations

Add skeletal skinning animations to an SDL3 GPU scene by loading glTF joint hierarchies, evaluating animation channels, and applying per-vertex blend weights to deform meshes in real-time. The Skill computes joint matrices and blends up to four joints per vertex on the GPU.

SDL3 GPU supports glTF skeletal animation and vertex blending by evaluating animation channels, rebuilding joint hierarchies, and computing joint matrices using inverse bind matrices. The provided shader pipeline blends up to four joint influences per vertex for real-time character deformation.

Compute joint matrices for glTF skinning by evaluating animation channels, rebuilding the joint hierarchy, and applying inverse bind matrices. This Skill handles the matrix computations and shader-based vertex blending to calculate final vertex positions directly on the GPU.

GPU skinning with glTF joints works by evaluating animation channels to update joint transforms, multiplying them by inverse bind matrices, and blending up to four joint matrices per vertex. The shader computes final vertex positions from these blended matrices and per-vertex weights.

You can animate characters in an SDL GPU project using glTF joint hierarchies by loading models with skinning information, evaluating animation channels, and rendering them with a shader-based skinning pipeline. The Skill supports real-time mesh deformation with up to four joint influences per vertex.

A limitation of vertex blending in this SDL3 implementation is the maximum of four joint influences per vertex. The pipeline requires glTF models containing proper skinning data, including joint hierarchies, inverse bind matrices, and per-vertex blend weights to function correctly.