Links:

• at Amazon.com
• at the Publisher
• errata

Note: this is tentative - I'm mainly looking at formatting right now. For more content, check back closer to when the class starts.

Chapter 1	Introduction: This chapter provides background about Computer Animation. Read it for general information and terminology. In particular, pay attention to the animation pipeline. For this class, most of this material is only for curiosity.
Chapter 2	Technical Background: This chapter is important if you need a refresher on the math of computer graphics. If you are a student who has a strong computer graphics background can skim this. However, if it's been while since you've had graphics or if you've only had one marginal course in graphics, you should read this to get a firm understanding of Euclidean space and transformations. If this material is hard for you, then you might consider taking another graphics course before taking this course. Most of the material is straightforward. The important stuff has to do with orientation representation: rotation matrix, fixed angles, Euler angles, axis-angle, quaternions. Material that might be new to you is the material on quaternions and how it avoids the gimbal lock situation of fixed/Euler angles.
Chapter 3	Interpolation: Most of this chapter is basic linear algebra - but pay particular attention to the material on quaternions. This covers the basics of interpolating values. There are 2 differences between this material and material on interpolating points along a curve, which you might have seen in a previous course: In animation, it's important to control the speed that points are generated along the curve, including arc-length parameterization and ease-in/ease-out control. In addition to position, orientation also has to be interpolated - using quaternion slerp and cubic quaternion interpolation.
Chapter 4	Interpolation-Based Animation: This chapter takes the basics of interpolation developed in the previous chapter and applies it to various tasks in animation including key frame interpolation, shape interpolation, and deforming objects. Most of these techniques are pretty straightforward. The main 2 to pay attention to are FFDs and Morphing. You can skip the grid-based morphing - that is overly complex and rarely used anymore - the feature-based morph is much more accessible.
Chapter 5	Kinematic Linkages: Forward and inverse kinematics are very useful techniques. You should already be familiar with forward kinematics. Review how the tree structure is constructed, traversed, and animated. With regard to inverse kinematics, pay particular attention to the Jacobian - it's not as difficult as it sounds. There are also pretty effective alternatives to using the Jacobian that are very commonly used.
Chapter 6	Motion Capture:
Chapter 7	Physcially Based Animation: This chapter has a lot in it that is useful in animation. Obviously, physics plays an important role in procedural animation.
Chapter 8	Fluids: Liquids & Gases:
Chapter 9	Modeling and Animating Human Figures:
Chapter 10	Facial Animation:
Chapter 11	Modeling Behavior:
Chapter 12	Special Models for Animation: We probably won't get to any of the material in this chapter.