Animation book

Jim Adams actually used to be the moderator of this forum, and I know that many people thought very highly of that book. It sets out to make sense of the D3DX animation library, which is a very daunting task.

My personal take on character animation is that you can learn it yourself (without paying for a book), just by looking around here on GDNet and in older forum posts. It's a tough task - it takes a lot of planning and a lot of re-coding.

Yeah I know that most things can be found on the internet no matter if it is here or somewhere else. But I have always been fond of reading. I can read on the bus, or on the airplane or where ever, and it is great to look up things that I can't remember. And I will always be easy to find. And I will learn things in the right order. And hopefully not miss a thing.

So if you say it is a good book, I might have a shot at it.

Maybe the reviews on the .com amazon might help you a bit with the choice of book...doesn't look too hot :

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592000371/qid=1101943826/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-3671885-4767010?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Shadx

This book is outdated now since there was a huge change to the dx9 animation structure in one of the updates that came after the book.
Not only is there now a function that loads a xfile frame hierarchy(ID3DXDoWhatIMean(void*)) so the whole part (50% of the book) about how to parse a xfile is useless unless u are intrested in how the x format works. But there is now also a new interface called ID3DXAnimationController, which handles animation and blending between them, this is done manually in the book, and its alot of work.

There is alot of good stuff in the book like ragdolls, softbody(bouncy titties), facial animation, cloth, etc.. But for the skinned mesh animation part its no longer up to date. Maybe if you are coding for the xbox which uses dx8, or are intrested in how skinning works, then it could still be usefull.