WASM 3D Animation Demo

http://aws-website-webassemblyskeletalanimation-ffaza.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

A couple of disclaimers, before starting:

1. This is one example of what WebAssembly can be used for, but you should check out https://github.com/shamadee/wasm-init also. It's a fantastic example, IMO.
2. Compiling this requires Emscripten. As of writing this code, it requires the incoming branch. See instructions below.
3. Assets are not included, because I do not have re-distribution rights on them.

• If you want to provide some I can use in this repo, send a PR. FBX, Blend, textured or materials only, I'll make it work.
• I need one walking animation, and at least one distinct dance animation (I used three in development)
• If you're taking requests, plz do Danny Avidan of the Game Grumps ❤️

4. I didn't intend to release the code when I started this project, so I apologize that the animation code itself isn't documented better for learning how it works.

Setup Emscripten

git clone https://github.com/juj/emsdk.git
cd emsdk
./emsdk install sdk-incoming-64bit binaryen-master-64bit
./emsdk activate sdk-incoming-64bit binaryen-master-64bit

Run source ./emsdk_env in the terminal you use for your builds to get the right emcc command.

What is this?

This is a simple character animation system, implemented with nearly* identical logic in both JavaScript (well, TypeScript) and WebAssembly (from C++). It uses skeletal animation to animate multiple instances of a character across the screen, starting in the background and moving gradually towards the foreground, before respawning in the back.

The user can configure via a menu in the upper-right (1) which animation system is being used (default: JavaScript) and (2) how many characters are on the screen at any time. On my PC (third-gen i3 CPU, GTX 980 Ti GPU) using 15 characters gave me around 5-10 FPS using the JavaScript implementation, and an easy 60 FPS using the WebAssembly implementation.

• WebGL is used to power the 3D graphics.
• The math code I use was heavily inspired (aka shamelessly copied from) gl-matrix
• WebAssembly support is required in your browser.

* As "nearly identical" as JavaScript and C++ can be - the classes are the same.

Why skeletal animation?

I absolutely wanted to do some kind of 3D graphics demo. They're cool, I'm a nerd for game programming stuff, and the difference between frames taking 15ms to render (60FPS) and 100ms to render(10FPS) is much more apparent than the same time difference when attached to a button press or mouse click.

That being decided, I decided to pick something CPU-bound, which would give me room to optimize the most significant bottleneck.

I considered a few different kinds of demos, but then I remembered how hilarious bugs are when working on skeletal animation systems, and my decision was made 😄