#### Skeletal Animation in Vertex Programs

You can implement skeletal animation in hardware by writing a vertex program which uses the per-vertex blending indices and blending weights, together with an array of world matrices (which will be provided for you by Ogre if you bind the automatic parameter ’world_matrix_array_3x4’). However, you need to communicate this support to Ogre so it does not perform skeletal animation in software for you. You do this by adding the following attribute to your vertex_program definition:

    	includes_skeletal_animation true

When you do this, any skeletally animated entity which uses this material will forgo the usual animation blend and will expect the vertex program to do it, for both vertex positions and normals. Note that ALL submeshes must be assigned a material which implements this, and that if you combine skeletal animation with vertex animation (See Animation) then all techniques must be hardware accelerated for any to be.