Skinning

From DmWiki

Skinning, also called rigging, is the process of setting up a model with virtual "bones" that can be manipulated to pose the model in various configurations. Skinning allows the model to be animated much more easily, since one has only to animate the bones, and the locations of all vertices are updated automatically by the 3D application. The animations created by skinning can also be more natural-looking, in the case of organic models (humans, animals, etc) since they imitate the underlying skeletal structure of the thing being modeled.

In a 3D engine, skinning also refers to the process of calculating the locations of each of the vertices given a bone configuration. This is frequently done using a vertex shader.

See also: skeletal animation.

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