Character skinning is one of the most important tasks in 3D animations, games design and visual effects in film production. With the development of 3D animations, a good way of skinning becomes an important role. With the increasing requirements of skinning, many new methods and techniques have emerged. The most core part is real-time shape deformations, to make the skin of characters to act more realistic, no informal deformation should happen. This paper introduces skinning technique in 4 categories: geometric methods, physical methods, example based approaches, energy based methods. A brief discussion and comparison of these methods are provided in the end.