Skeleton-based skinning is widely used for realistic animation of complex characters defining mesh movement as a function of the underlying skeleton. In this paper, we propose a new robust skeletal animation framework for 3D articulated models. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we present refinement techniques for improving skeletal representation based on local characteristics which are extracted using centroids and principal axes of the character’s components. Then, we use rigid skinning deformations to achieve realistic motion avoiding vertex weights. A novel method eliminates the artifacts caused by self-intersections, providing sufficiently smooth skin deformation.