It is ridiculous that there seem to be no reasonable explanations of skeletal animation

...and that includes in books (there's a book devoted to it but it's a little horky [props to Nathan for the word], and the only other book I've seen on the topic depends on DirectX code to handle many things.)

I'm going to put one up on this blog shortly as I ran into someone looking for this information and I was shocked to find that Googling was not very helpful as there are bits and pieces of the information all over the place. It would be very helpful, I presume, for someone to post everything you really need to do from importing file formats (I'll probably explain OgreXML and maybe Collada as well), to blending vertex and skeletal animation, to skinning.

I know I wish someone had done that for me back in 1999. Hopefully I'll get it up this year. Probably a short series of posts starting with the background, the terminology (lots of terms for the same things [i.e. Bind Pose/Reference Pose, Palette Matrix/Inverse Model Space Matrix, et cetera...]

It will all be CPU based skinning so that it applies potentially to any language. Hmmm... I wonder if anyone has ever put a skeletal animation system in Flash before (I hate ActionScript/Flash programming, but that might be interesting.)