Stupid Question of The Day...What's the difference between a skinned mesh and a non-skinned mesh?

I know after using Unity for more that 2 years that this is a very stupid question but what's the difference between a skinned mesh and a non-skinned mesh?

I thought that a simple mesh is the same as a non skinned mesh: no texture wrapping, no bones nor rigging, no color...all you can see is the vertices and lines connecting them...a mesh.

I thought that a skinned mesh is one that has at least texture wrapping, and maybe is also rigged with bones.

The reason I asked is because I watched a video and the creator of the video said one mesh is a skinned mesh (it had textures with colors as expected). And he said that this other mesh is a non-skinned mesh...but that non-skinned mesh also had what appeared to be a texture.

I am officially confused.

 

Now you got me confused. I believe the difference is skinned has bone weights and non-skinned doesn't.

 

Skinned vs non skinned doesn't refer to the mesh having a "skin" surface, both have polygon surfaces with normals and texture mapping uvs. What a skinned mesh means is the mesh has bone weighting; the "skin" refers to how things can deform, like skin does on a body joint.

 

Then what is a mesh without texture mapping called?
And what is a mesh without texture mapping and without polygon surfaces called?

 

There's no name for a mesh with or without texture mapping UVs, that's just a mesh with out UVs. Maybe textured and untextured but that's more a statement about how it's being rendered than an innate quality of the mesh. Same with a mesh with out surfaces; it's not a mesh if it doesn't have the data for the polygons which make up the surfaces but you can render it as a wireframe to show the polygon edges, or maybe as a point cloud showing only the vertex locations.

 

Vector graphics

 

Well, we're talking in the context of modern graphics, and modern graphics generally stores vertices and triangles but not the edges by themselves. Even 3D vector graphics these days are usually done by rendering mesh edges or creating very thin meshes that appear to be lines. There are ways to render lines directly, but they're intentionally crippled on consumer hardware so they're slow and it's one of the "features" you pay for when buying professional GPUs to draw them with out significant artificial penalty. Back in the AGP days of NVidia you could magically render lines 1000x faster by soldering a connection on the GPU because the multi-thousand dollar pro level GPU and the consumer GPU only differed by a few missing RAM chips and that connected wire.