1. A method of optimizing joint positions of a binding skeleton, the method comprising: receiving 3D mesh information, skeleton information and linear blend skinning (LBS) weights related to a 3D model; generating a plurality of representative structure preserving deformation skeleton exemplars sampled from a manipulation space of all possible skeleton deformations; defining a linear relationship between joint positions of the binding skeleton and bone translations in the skeleton exemplars by constraining the bones to be connected at their respective joints when the bones of each skeleton exemplar are rotated; for each bone of each skeleton exemplar, fixing a rotation entity while allowing a translation entity to change and calculating an energy entity representing a quality of deformation of the mesh as a function of the rotation and translation; and determining optimized joint positions of the binding skeleton so as to minimize said energy entity over said plurality of skeleton exemplars thereby improving quality of mesh transformations and placement of the binding skeleton with respect to a mesh rest pose.