GPU Animation

GAM 576: GPU Architecture, 2026

A custom 3D engine that moves skeletal animation blending onto the GPU, powered by a from-scratch asset pipeline and modular C++ architecture.

Category Engine Development

Role Solo Programmer

Duration 3 Months

Skills Languages: C++17 HLSL Proto3

Graphics / APIs: DirectX 11 DXGI GPU Compute Shaders SIMD

Libraries / Frameworks: Google Protocol Buffers Abseil tiny_gltf stb_image PugiXml

Tools / Build: Visual Studio 2022 MSBuild Multi-project solutions DLL linking

Concepts: Skeletal Animation Asset Pipelines Memory Management GPU Programming Data Serialization Design Patterns (Iterator, Strategy, Template Method)

Overview

A C++/DirectX 11 3D game engine and asset conversion pipeline focused on skeletal animation, mesh rendering, and glTF model importing, built around a modular architecture with libraries for math, file I/O, tree structures, and Protocol Buffer serialization. Features a GPU compute shader pipeline for animation blending, a multi-stage asset conversion system (FBX → glTF → custom protobuf binary), a DLL-based modular service architecture across 18 projects, and custom diagnostic tooling including memory leak tracking and SIMD-aligned allocation.

Key Features

GPU Compute Shader Animation Pipeline

Offloaded skeletal animation blending from CPU to DirectX 11 compute shaders, reducing per-frame CPU load for multi-character scenes.

Multi-Stage Asset Conversion

Built a two-stage pipeline (FBX → glTF → custom protobuf binary) that decouples artist-friendly authoring formats from runtime-optimized engine formats.

DLL-Based Modular Architecture

Designed 18 projects across two solutions with standalone libraries (Math, File, Manager, PCSTree) exported as DLLs with well-defined interfaces for independent testing and reuse.

Custom Diagnostic Tooling

Implemented a memory leak tracker (MemTrace) with file/line granularity, SIMD-aligned allocation, DirectX debug layer integration, and thread tracing for low-level debugging.