Summary This paper introduces an automated framework of skinning a character at interactive speeds while maintaining a high level of flexibility for animation artists to use a wide assortment of animation packages. The problem being addressed by the authors is being able to perform convincing skin deformations that are fast and memory efficient while not limiting the animation artist. Example skinned skeletal models are used to fit the parameters of a deformation model to find the best approximation. This method is an alternative to standard linear blending, which can lead to visual artifacts due to blending dissimilar transformations. Key Ideas 1. Beginning with a rigged character, skin deformations are sampled from posing the character in several different positions. It is important that all joints are fully exercised over the series of different poses to guarantee and good sampling and to ensure that the extremem poses of the character are also sampled. 2. From this sampling, a set of joints is determined that affect each vertex. These joints originate from the original examples as well as added joints that relate to the existing joints which are calculated automatically by the system. The extra joints provide a richer deformation than standard linear blending. 3. A bilinear least-squares problem is solved to fit the parameters of the desired skin deformation.