Skeletal animation

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Skeletal animation or rigging is a technique in computer animation in which a character (or other articulated object) is represented in two parts: a polygonal or parametric mesh representation of the surface of the object, and a hierarchical set of interconnected parts (called joints or bones, and collectively forming the skeleton), a virtual armature used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh.^[1] While this technique is often used to animate humans and other organic figures, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive, and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object—such as a door, a spoon, a building, or a galaxy. When the animated object is more general than, for example, a humanoid character, the set of "bones" may not be hierarchical or interconnected, but simply represent a higher-level description of the motion of the part of mesh it is influencing.

The technique was introduced in 1988 by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, Richard Laperrière, and Daniel Thalmann.^[2] This technique is used in virtually all animation systems where simplified user interfaces allows animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry; most notably through inverse kinematics and other "goal-oriented" techniques.