Driven by the demands of research and the entertainment industry, the techniques of animation are pushed to render increasingly complex objects with ever-greater life-like appearance and motion. This rapid progression of knowledge and technique impacts professional developers, as well as students. Developers must maintain their understanding of conceptual foundations, while their animation tools become ever more complex and specialized. The second edition of Rick Parent's Computer Animation is an excellent resource for the designers who must meet this challenge. The first edition established its reputation as the best technically oriented animation text. This new edition focuses on the many recent developments in animation technology, including fluid animation, human figure animation, and soft body animation. The new edition revises and expands coverage of topics such as quaternions, natural phenomenon, facial animation, and inverse kinematics. The book includes up-to-date discussions of Maya scripting and the Maya C++ API, programming on real-time 3D graphics hardware, collision detection, motion capture, and motion capture data processing.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction 1.1 Perception 1.2 The Heritage of Animation 1.3 Animation Production 1.4 Computer Animation Production 1.5 A Brief History of Computer Animation 1.6 Chapter Summary References 2. Technical Background 2.1 Spaces and Transformations 2.2 Orientation Representation 2.3 Chapter Summary References 3. Interpolation 3.1 Interpolating Values 3.2 Controlling the Motion of a Point Along a Curve 3.3 Interpolation of Orientations 3.4 Working with Paths 3.5 Chapter Summary References 4. Interpolation -Based Animation 4.1 Key-Frame Systems 4.2 Animation Languages 4.3 Deforming Objects 4.4 3D Shape Interpolation 4.5 Morphing (2D) 4.6 Chapter Summary References 5. Kinematic Linkages 5.1 Hierarchical Modeling 5.2 Forward Kinematics 5.3 Inverse Kinematics 5.4 Chapter Summary References 6. Motion Capture 6.1 Motion Capture Technologies 6.2 Processing the Images 6.3 Camera Calibration 6.4 3D Position Reconstruction 6.5 Fitting to the Skeleton 6.6 Output from Motion Capture Systems 6.7 Manipulating Motion Capture Data 6.8 Chapter Summary References 7. Physically Based Animation 7.1 Basic Physics - A Review 7.2 Spring Meshes 7.3 Particle Systems 7.4 Rigid Body Simulation 7.5 Enforcing Soft and Hard Constraints 7.6 Chapter Summary References 8. Fluids: Liquids & Gases 8.1 Specific Fluid Models 8.2 Computational Fluid Dynamics 8.3 Chapter Summary References 9. Modeling and Animating Human Figures 9.1 Overview of Virtual Human Representation 9.2 Reaching and Grasping 9.3 Walking 9.4 Getting Dressed Up 9.5 Chapter Summary References 10. Facial Animation 10.1 The Human Face 10.2 Facial Models 10.3 Animating the Face 10.4 Lip-Sync Animation 10.5 Chapter Summary References 11. Modeling Behavior 11.1 Knowing the Environment 11.2 Aggregate Behavior 11.3 Primitive Behaviors 11.4 Modeling Intelligent Behavior 11.5 Crowd Management 11.6 Chapter Summary References 12. Special Models for Animation 12.1 Implicit Surfaces 12.2 Plants 12.3 Subdivision Surfaces 12.4 Chapter Summary References App A. Rendering Issues A.1 Double Buffering A.2 Compositing A.3 Displaying Moving Objects: Motion Blur A.4 Drop Shadows A.5 Billboarding and Impostors A.6 Summary References App B. Background Information and Techniques B.1 Vectors and Matrices B.2 Geometric Computations B.3 Transformations B.4 Denevit and Hartenberg Representation for Linked Appendages B.5 Interpolating and Approximating Curves B.6 Randomness B.7 Physics Primer B.8 Numerical Integration Techniques B.9 Standards for Moving Pictures B.10 Camera Calibration References