I''m looking for good references on the topic of skeletal motion/animation. I''ve heard people on the net talk about methods where one vertice is attached to several bones, and I''d like to learn about that. Also, what is IK? I''ve heard people mention that too and I wanna learn about it. Basically, I get the impression that there is one standard, agreed-upon way to do skeletal motion (is that true?), and I want to learn that standard. PS- I have already read the brief tutorial on NeHe. Thanks.

What you want is ''skinning'', or ''matrix palette skinning'' to give its full name. Google should turn up plenty of hits. There''s also ''stitching'' and ''segmented bodies''.

IK is ''inverse kinematics''. It turns up in two places in skeletal animation...

Content authoring tools like Maya or 3DSMAX Character Studio provide IK to help animatiors fill in the gaps between key frames.

Some game engines run real-time IK to animate skeletons (or to modify animations on the fly). This is VERY HARD and there is no magic bullet - the only thing that generally works is ''rag doll'' animation, and even this is non-trivial.

Awesome. Thanks guys