After quite a bit of time, where I was unavailable to do anything game development related (sorry, too much things going on at this point), I finally found one weekend to get back to my project. I had a bit of struggle with animations (my pipeline was Blender -> Assimp -> Engine) - and it took quite a bit to overcome some annoying parts, but the code is more clean and pretty much ready for rest of the skinning (Another note for me, which took me quite a bit, before I finally kicked myself to print them to display and immediately spot the issue - STOP initializing matrices hoping that they're in correct major order, by Murphy's laws definition they are not unless you triple-check them!).

If everything goes well (time-wise), I may finally have capable animation system finished with interface within weeks. The current list goes like:

• Loading skinned FBX files with animation (Done)
• Debug rendering skeleton with animation (Done)
• Rendering animated skin
• Skinned model component allowing to do some setup in right panel
• Allowing to map animation to another skeleton (i.e. having multiple animation files per one file with mesh - saves a ton of time in Blender)
• Animator component allowing to switch between animations (state machine)
• Blending in transitions (possibly blend trees later)

Screenshot time:

I will address animation loading through this pipeline at some point in future (once at least skinning is done too). I was kind of … well … shocked by lack of newer information available (pretty much most of the articles, projects, etc. are 5 or more years old, therefore being a bit dated). To be fair though, Assimp may not even be standard anymore (I know, one can write a custom exporter - and custom exporters are still technically state of the art in most in-house engines) … and I don't see as many people messing with Vulkan/Direct3D as in the past.

Thinking about it, I could really export from Blender directly into game engine scene, without requirement for interchange format(s) - it could save a headache or two messing with Assimp description (in the end I did the math - and figured out what I'm doing wrong). My original choice for managing importing of resources were Assimp (and DevIL) due to large amount of formats supported, but in the end - when you build the project, everything is stored in custom formats to improve loading times.