What is Skeletal Animation Technique?

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What is Skeletal Animation Technique?


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What is Skeletal Animation? What is Skeletal Animation Technique Process 1. Skeleton 2. Rigging 3. Keyframes 4. Output Advantages and Disadvantages of Skeletal Animation


What is Skeletal Animation? ď ˝

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



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While this technique is often used to animate humans or more commonly for organic modelling, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive, and the similar technique can be used to control the deformation of any object a door, a spoon, a building.


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When the animated object is more general than for example a humanoid character the set of bones may not be hierarchical or interconnected, but it only represents the higher level description of the motion of the part of mesh or skin it is influencing.


Skeletal Animation Technique Process


1. Skeleton ď ˝

The skeleton is the most important object in a skeletal animation Process.

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A skeleton is a set of bones that can be hierarchically organized.


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Usually an object has some important joints.

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For instance, for a character, the most important joints are the hip, the knee, the neck, etc.


2. Rigging 

Once a skeleton step is done next is rigging.

In rigging place the bones exactly where they would be in a real-world skeleton.

Each defined bone must be connected to its belonging part of the object being animated.

In this way, the bones control in the final movements.


3. Keyframes 

A keyframe in animation is a drawing that defines the starting and ending points of a smooth transition.

A sequence of keyframes defines a series of movements the viewer will see in the final animation.

To have a smooth transition between keyframes other in-between ones are inserted.



For obtaining a particular pose of the character, you need to change the position of the bones.

It can be done by using geometric transformations such as rotation, translation and scaling.

All skeletal animations have keyframes.


4. Output ď ˝

Once the keyframes are set up, and the animation looks good when playing into the loop you are ready to use it anywhere.


Advantages and Disadvantages of Skeletal Animation


Advantages of Skeletal Animation 1. The skeletal animation uses tools that make the process of animation simpler. 2. Skeletal animation allows you to make dynamic animations because you can manipulate (translate, rotate, scale) all character’s bones at runtime.


3. Bone-based animations are simpler when you want to make multiple animations for one character. 4. Skeletal animation requires a fewer image and less memory. 5. Skeletal animation allows you to create a natural movement with the help of inverse or forward kinematics.


Disadvantages of Skeletal Animation 1. Skeletal animations are more complex. 2. Skeletal animations require more processor time. 3. Skeletal animations have the impediment of bone rigidity.


Thank You


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