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.

* The leading text for animation courses that have a technical focus

* Includes companion site with contemporary animation examples drawn from research and entertainment, sample animations, and example code

* Decribes the key mathematical and algorithmic foundations of animation that provide the animator with a deep understanding and control of technique

"There is no serious competition for my course. Parent is by far the best text out there. A new edition would be great. If not, then please keep the first one in print!"—Christian Darken, Naval Postgraduate School

Rick Parent is an Associate Professor at Ohio State University, where he teaches computer graphics and computer animation. His research in computer animation focuses on its relation to modeling and animating the human figure, with special emphasis on geometric modeling and implicit surfaces. Rick earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Ohio State University and a Bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Dayton. In 1977, he was awarded "Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award" (one of four given nationally) by the NCC. He has served on numerous SIGGRAPH committees, in addition to the Computer Graphics International 2000 Program Committee and the Computer Animation '99 Program Committee and is on the editorial board of the Visual Computer Journal.

(Current) Introduction; Technical Background; Interpolation and Basic Techniques; Advanced Algorithms; Natural Phenomena; Modeling and Animating Articulated Figures; Appendix A: Rendering Issues; Appendix B: Background Information and Techniques