Abstract: In this paper, we present a data-driven technique for synthesizing skin deformation from skeletal motion. We first create a database of dynamic skin deformations by recording the motion of the surface of the skin with a very large set of motion capture markers. We then build a statistical model of the deformations by dividing them into two parts: static and dynamic. Static deformations are modeled as a function of pose. Dynamic deformations are caused by the actions of the muscles as they move the joints and the inertia of muscles and fat. We approximate these effects by fitting a set of dynamic equations to the pre-recorded data. We demonstrate the viability of this approach by generating skin deformations from the skeletal motion of an actor. We compare the generated animation both to synchronized video of the actor and to ground truth animation created directly from the large marker set.