Skeletal Animation Looping with Autocorrelation

This is a bit of a fun post highlighting how some simple maths can be used to create great visual results. With some basic statistics, we can create looping skeletal animations from an input data set that contains non-exact loops. A typical example is a motion capture sampled run animation: This is derived from the CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database, which has been converted to BVH files by Bruce Hahne.

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Quaternions and Dual Quaternion Skinning

For some reason I like quaternions. I fell in love with complex numbers back in school when I found out that they made more sense than real numbers. While it might not exactly be helpful to visualise quaternions as an extension of complex numbers, there's something in there that just grabs at me. Unlike previous posts, I've managed to update to D3D11 so I'll be discussing implementation details in terms of HLSL (Shader Model 4, as I also have a D3D10 dev machine).