3D Mesh Processing and Character Animation focusses specifically on topics that are important in three-dimensional modelling, surface design and real-time character animation. It provides an in-depth coverage of data structures and popular methods used in geometry processing, keyframe and inverse kinematics animations and shader based processing of mesh objects. It also introduces two powerful and versatile libraries, OpenMesh and Assimp, and demonstrates their usefulness through implementations of a wide range of algorithms in mesh processing and character animation respectively. This Textbook is written for students at an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate level who are interested in the study and development of graphics algorithms for three-dimensional mesh modeling and analysis, and animations of rigged character models. The key topics covered in the book are mesh data structures for processing adjacency queries, simplification and subdivision algorithms, mesh parameterization methods, 3D mesh morphing, skeletal animation, motion capture data, scene graphs, quaternions, inverse kinematics algorithms, OpenGL-4 tessellation and geometry shaders, geometry processing and terrain rendering.

This book brings together several advanced topics in computer graphics that are important in the areas of game development, three-dimensional animation and real-time rendering. The book is designed for final-year undergraduate or first-year graduate students, who are already familiar with the basic concepts in computer graphics and programming. It aims to provide a good foundation of advanced methods such as skeletal animation, quaternions, mesh processing and collision detection. These and other methods covered in the book are fundamental to the development of algorithms used in commercial applications as well as research.