mesh skeleton system ?

I am currently in the thoes of doing just this - well, basically.
I use the dreaded .x file format (not too good for animation stuff - gets confusing), and pretty much drag out the skeleton information (keeping the hierarchy information) and store it in a class, and then pull out the skinned mesh information and store it in another class. You can then reference the skeleton information from the mesh (the mesh stores which bones affect it's vertices) and transform the mesh.
A nice side effect of this process is that you can "attached" objects to certain bones (ie hand to gun) by just referencing the posed skeleton object.
You can basically do anything you like - just depends on what you want to use it for.
Steele.

Well, with the .x file format skinned mesh, the vertices are stored with weights per bone. So any mesh must have bone weights of the same name in order to utilise the same skeleton. This is all done at the time the resource (mesh) is generated (in my case, in Lightwave and then converted to .x).
You may think that then the process of mesh and skeleton division is pointless, as each mesh must have the same bones defined. The power really comes with animations - the bone animations only need to be defined and stored once. This adds an overhead during mesh generation, as all "mimicking" models need the same number of bones with the same name, but has so far proven successful.
Steele.

The reason I think it is good and I would would like to use this method is, the animations wouldnt be stored in the model, making smaller file size - because all the animations would just be moving and rotating the bones, and you could also move parts independently whenever you want - for example have your characters head turn, looking at something while the rest of the body would stay in place. There may be many other advantages