Portal:Animation/Selected picture/36

'Bones' (in green) used to pose a hand. In practice, the 'bones' themselves are often hidden and replaced by more user-friendly objects. In this example from the open source project Sintel, these 'handles' (in blue) have been scaled down to bend the fingers. The bones are still controlling the deformation, but the animator only sees the 'handles'.

Skeletal animation

Credit: Sintel

Skeletal animation is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh.