Skinning is the process of attaching a renderable skin to an underlying articulated skeleton. There are several approaches to skinning with varying degrees of realism and complexity. Our main focus will be on the smooth skinning algorithm, which is both fast and reasonably effective, and has been used extensively in real time and pre-rendered animation. The smooth skinning algorithm goes by many other names in the literature, such as blended skinning, multimatrix skinning, linear blend skinning, skeletal subspace deformation (SSD), and sometimes just skinning. This chapter will explain the smooth skinning algorithm in detail and provide additional information about the offline creation and binding process. Binding refers to the initial attachment of the skin to the underlying skeleton and assigning any necessary information to the vertices. Smooth skinning, while fast and straightforward, does have its limitations, and so alternative techniques are also briefly introduced and referenced, including a variety of deformation techniques and some more elaborate anatomically based approaches that simulate muscle and skin deformations