What is weighting?

[svenip]

skinning is the process to assign cv's to specific joints whti a weight. so you can say that one cv will get just 10% of the movement, another one 20% and so on. it#s just how high the influence of a specific joint on a cv is.

the skinning in maya is simply explained. each joints stays for a virtual cluster, and this vir cluster is parented to the joint. so if you rotate the joint, the cv assigned to that cluster are moving with that. and like in clusters you can paint the weight with a black/white map. so white is a weight of 1 (100%) and black 0 (0%). 100% means the cv moves with the joint directly, 50% means the cv get's only 50% of the movement.

there are two different skinning methods in maya. rigid and smooth. rigid means every cv can have only one joint as an influence. smooth means every cv can have as many influences as you want. the only thing that must be, is that the overall weight on a cv must be 1. so if you have 3 joints controlling a cv, one joint can have 0.2 as the weight, the other one 0.5 and the next one should be 0.3 to get the overall 1. maya makes sure that this overall wieght is 1 by default. this is called weight normalization. but you can switch it off, because it's getting you into trouble in some cases. but then you by your self have to make sure that it's 1 overall.

so skinning assigns each cv to one ore more joints with a weight, so that you can make sure that some parts are deforming more than others and so on.

[rsalonen]

Wow, thanks svenip, that was a really good explaination. I start to understand it abit, but I must try it out myself to fully understand it.
I really learned allot from that.

but just a quick question, in what situation do you use rigid or smooth bind for the skin?
You got some example? A human or a creature move pretty smooth so I guess they should have a smooth bind then?

Once again, thank you.

[svenip]

you can get smooth deforms even with the rigid bind, it has some tools to achieve this, but not so nice and easy like smooth bind.

look at my first post in this thread. this is the way that works really well for me.

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10368

[rsalonen]

again, thanks :thumbsup:

Now I just have to make a character to try it out on. And also to animate walking, never done it so it's going to be a huge challange with a poor resault probably :surprised

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