Abstract. This paper presents a novel skeleton-based method for deforming meshes, based on an approximate skeleton. The major difference from previous skeleton-based methods is that they used the skeleton to control movement of vertices, whereas we use it to control the simplices defining the model. This allows errors, that occur near joints in other methods, to be spread over the whole mesh, giving smooth transitions near joints. Our method also needs no vertex weights defined on the bones, which can be tedious to choose in previous methods.