Skeletal animation is a technique frequently used in 3D animation wherein a character or object is animated using the rig of a hierarchical developed skeleton. The skeleton includes the bones that influence the 3D mesh to make an animation, and is animated just like any other shape or geometry.
How Skeletal Animation Works
Bones (Rigging)
These bones are the inner structure of your model. Each bone maps to a certain area of the mesh and deforms it.
Skinning
How the 3D mesh is linked to the skeleton. The mesh bends and moves with the bones, producing natural movement.
The Pros of Skeletal Animation
Efficient Animation
By animating the skeleton, which deforms the mesh (model) rather than manually adjusting each vertex of a model, animators save time and work tremendously.
Reusable Animations
If an animator can setup a skeleton rig for one character than it’s relatively easy to apply the same animations (for walking, running, jumping) across multiple models, which makes skeletal animation very flexible in terms of character animation.
Using Skeletal Animation
Video Games: Of course, skeletal animation is widely used in all video games, simply because this enable to represent more life-like behavior of characters with relative ease (e.g. character’s walk, fight, climb.)
Movies and TV: Animated characters in movies from Frozen or your favorite TV show are often animated using skeletal rigs to resemble better and make the movements more natural.
Skeletal animation is an important efficient technique used for achieving a realistic and flexible movement of characters in both 3D games and animations.
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