Advanced Animation with DirectX [With CDROM]

This is the best book, to my opinion, in the game development series, and probably the best character animation book on DirectX (the secondary best is the Programming Role Playing Game with Directx8). The first and the most important good thing on this book is that it concentrates on the advanced character animation techniques in DirectX9 rather than wasting half of the book talking about some basic things such as windows programming, DirectX and even C++. The book is only 500 pages, but containing lots of useful information and more importantly with decent working demo using D3DX library in DirectX9, not like most of the character animation books in the market, repeating lots of theory, and then with trivial, not re-useable code.The contents of the books are excellent in terms of smooth blending of theory and programming practice using DirectX, especially parts concerning timing of animation, skeletal animation, real time animation blending, and even the physical simulation of rigid body animation. This book also presents other animation techniques such as facial animation and particle animation.It will be useful if the book could talk about incorporation of simple forward/inverse kinematics techniques for the character to achieve the "object grasping" scenario, which should not be too far away from the level that the book has reached, as good materials have been presented on how to control and update the transformation matrices of hierarchical skeletal-based character animation. In a word, this is an excellent book for anybody will like to know the techniques for character animation in DirectX.