Abstract: Most data formats of skeletal animation are not suitable for high performance system, because they aim at data exchange and have low speed of the loading and parsing. In addition, due to the limited number of constant registers, GPU cannot be utilized fully. This paper presents an optimized scheme for data management and rendering of the skeletal animation. Firstly, in data preprocessing stage the system converts the FBX data format into data format which it employed. Secondly, in rendering stage, a GPU-accelerated approach based on VTF (Vertex Texture Fetch) technology is used by pre-creating the matrixes of bones, weights and offsets into the textures to reduce the bandwidth of communication between CPU and GPU. The paper finally realizes the simulation system of skeletal animation for marine life.

Key words: skeletal animation, GPU, vertex texture fetch, marine life simulation