>I have written an utility to make animations. I model with Wings 3D and then
>(through my app) render them in Povray. Now here's a demo:

[...]

>Now as you can see from demo, blending bones doesn't quite do what it's
>supposed to :( . Do you know any good web links to articles about bone
>blending?

There is several software, that does just this task. Commercial ones are 
Poser (<http://www.e-frontier.com/>) and DAZ Studio 
(<http://www.daz3d.com/>) (the latter one is free of charge). In Poser, 
you can build your own models, DAZ Studio needs ready-made models (DAZ 
just bought Hexagon, so they can also offer a modeler).

An open source solution is blender (to be found on 
<http://www.blender3d.org/>). If you don't like the results of the 
internal renderer or yafray (the default external renderer in blender), 
you can export the results of the animation and convert them to POV-Ray 
scenes (so we are on-topic in this newsgroup), using PoseRay for the 
conversion.
Also for Poser and DAZ Studio, you can use PoseRay to convert the scenes 
to POV-Ray (originally, PoseRay was written to convert from Poser to 
POV-Ray, AFAIK).


Poser and DAZ Studio both use poser models for posing and animation. 
These models contain the mesh(es) for the surface, the bones for the 
skeleton and parameters, that indicate, which bone has influence - and 
in which degree - over which part of the mesh(es).

blender uses a similar technology, but another file format. You can 
build the shape of the model by several means (one of them are meshes), 
and add a so called armature, containing the bones for the skeleton. 
Just like in poser models, the degree of influence of the bones on parts 
of the body is adjustable.
blender also knows subsurface modeling, so you can build very simple 
meshes, but get very smooth surfaces.
You can import some aspects of poser models into blender, which are the 
meshes (in Wavefront rsp. .obj format) and part of the skeleton 
information (the latter by means of a script/plugin that is available 
for free anywhere on the WWW). 



Best regards,

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