Skeletons are hierarchical, articulated structures that let you pose and animate bound models. A skeleton provides a deformable model with the same underlying structure as the human skeleton gives the human body.

Just like in the human body, the location of joints and the number of joints you add to a skeleton determine how the skeleton’s bound model or ‘body’ moves. When you bind a model to a skeleton, it is called skinning. For more information on the process of skinning, see What is skinning?.