The disadvantages of a mesh based character system is that you have to move and define the position of every point on a model. This many vertices and polygons can become a lot for a computer to handle.
The advantages of skeletal animation are that instead of moving each point of the mesh individually, you move them all at once using a skeleton. Since a skeleton usually has about 50 bones, this is much easier than using 3000 polygons.
The picture on the left shows a skeleton without a mesh, you can see all the bones and joints.
“To weight each vertex individually”, which is the process of snapping a mesh to a skeleton, means that if the weight is decreased, the mesh will not snap to the skeleton properly and will look deformed.
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