Skeletal mesh files associate polygon vertices with "bones", so that the vertex positions are updated whenever the "skeleton" moves. Individual bones may reference other bones, resulting in a hierarchy of transformations to be processed in order to determine the final position of any given vertex.
Skeletal mesh files associate polygon vertices with "bones", so that the vertex positions are updated whenever the "skeleton" moves. Individual bones may reference other bones, resulting in a hierarchy of transformations to be processed in order to determine the final position of any given vertex.
Skeletal mesh files are useful for creating rag-doll physics; each part of the mesh can be physically modelled as a separate-but-connected part of the overall "shape", with associations between bones being used to create joints between each part.
Skeletal mesh structures can be animated by applying transformations to the basic skeletal structure. This is in contrast to "morph-based" animation techniques (used by .MD2 meshes in Quake II, for example), where each "frame" of animation is represented as a separate list of explicit vertex positions.
