Animation Systems and Skeletal Deformation Questions

Design and implementation of animation pipelines and runtime systems for character and object motion. Topics include skeletal skinning and deformation, pose representation, bone hierarchies, animation blending and state machines, blend trees and animation graphs, procedural animation and inverse kinematics, ragdoll and physics integration, animation retargeting, compression and sampling strategies, streaming and memory management for animation assets, and the toolchain considerations for exporting and iterating on animations. Candidates should be prepared to discuss trade offs between performing skinning and blending on the central processing unit versus the graphics processing unit, level of detail strategies for animation, synchronization with physics, and profiling approaches to identify animation related bottlenecks at scale.