Parallelization of Animation Blending on the PlayStation®3

Abstract: An animation system gives a dynamic and life-like feel to character motions, allowing motion behaviour that far transcends the mere spatial translations of classic computer games. This increase in behavioural complexity however does not come for free as animation systems often are haunted by considerable performance overhead, the extent of which reflecting the complexity of the desired system.  In game development performance optimization is key, the pursuit of which is aided by the static hardware configuration of modern gaming consoles. These allow extensive optimization through specializing the application, at whole or in part, to the underlying hardware architecture. In this master's theses a method, that efficiently utilizes the parallel architecture of the PlayStation®3, is proposed in order to migrate the process of animation evaluation and blending from a single-thread implementation on the main processor to a fully parallelized multi-thread solution on the associated coprocessors. This method is further complimented with an in-depth study of the underlying theoretical foundations, as well as a reflection on similar works and approaches as used by other contemporary game development companies.