I would like to add skeletal animation to my framework and am currently reading Physics Based Animation in order to get myself acclimated to the area, however, it's pretty dense material and the book while pretty straight forward doesn't do much explaining beyond crunching out algorithms.
I could probably take some time and implement this just from that book alone, but there is really a lot to learn for me. From the funky Denavit-Hartenberg notion to Jacobian transformations, which are completely new to me. I'd have to dust off my old MV Calculus books and spend a few weeks examining/implementing everything just to get up and running. So I was wondering if there was an easier approach?
So far I've also seen Game Engine Architecture (rev.3) recommended as a good intro book on the subject but after skimming over the IK chapter (shouldn't even call it a chapter, it's more of a subsection within a skeletal animation chapter) and it doesn't even go into half as much detail as my Physics Based Animation book. It just briefly explains what IK is in about a page length.
So are there any other resources I could use to help me supplement this book or is it one of those areas that I really have to spend my time with? I'm also contemplating of maybe even using an existing library (not too keen on this but I will consider it if the material is just too time consuming to understand/implement), however all I could find was ozz-animation on github which I will take a look at, but are there no mainstream libraries that handle this?
Thanks.