Reusing animations with multiple models?

Question

Is it possible to give several humanoid models the same animations without starting from scratch every time?

Answer 1

Yes. The process essentially boils down to first having a skeleton from which several models are based. Then you wrap the net around the skeleton and the "weight" of each vertex with bones in the skeleton, which affect the movement. Then you apply the animation and transformations to the skeleton, and not to the vertices of the model, and each of the vertices in the "skin" is moved by the skeleton in accordance with the weight given to each bone.

As Tre said, it's called "rigging."