Smooth Skinning

This step for many people is not exactly the most fun part of the process. Maya sometimes behaves very poorly. She does not inherently know what everything should look like when our character is finished. Therefore she tries to figure out what it should do mathematically. We have the responsibility for fixing its short comings to get the results that we need...... Alas Smooth Skinning.

Smooth Skinning is the process that we use to tell Maya exactly what influence each bone should have on the skin that it is now hooked to. So when a bone is moved or rotated it moves the skin that it is hooked as well. We call this Influence.


The important thing to remember about influence is that the color black (when you are painting skin weights) shows you that the bone that is currently selected has NO INFLUENCE over the black area, and PURE White has TOTAL and COMPLETE influence over that area. Grey is a little bit of black and white mixed together so depending on the shade of grey that we see, we will may have a little bit of influence (darker grey) or a lot (lighter grey).

In the picture above the knee bone is selected. It is having influence over parts of the leg specifically most of the shin. 

Is that as clear as Mud???

This will all make sense as you work on the lesson. Read this again as you work on the lesson... believe it or not it will help!!!

Videos

Getting Started

Working on the head and neck

Smoothing the weights on the head and neck

Working on the head and neck

More Head and Neck

Starting the foot

Starting the leg

Upper part of the leg

Hips and Buttocks

Starting the Fingers

Its about that thumb... bout that thumb... no troubles

Working on the forearm

Testing the rig and cleaning it all up

Finishing the chest and back

Mirroring the skin weights