how do you skin? (i feel i'm doing it wrong:(

[PEN]

Well if you want to know how I go about it you will have to pick up a copy of my 3rd DVD from http://cg-academy.net. I cover ever step of the process in there.

[ErikSvensson]

Here is how i do it.

1. Place bones properly.
2. Add a skin bind (Maya)
3. Tweak and re-bind the skin, try poses to see if the skeleton match.
4. Here i start to paint things.I like to start with the head or the hips and work outwards. Mostly the hips and chest first.
5. I always use a 100 % hard edged brush to have full controll of the mesh, unless its many many polygons were a smooth brush would fit best.
6. Paint like 100 % weighting at one area, to a bone that is placed there, take the bone that comes next, and paint maybe with replace and 50% weight. That way they share the exact same ammount of skinweight.

Thats about it, just working the mesh through, then I prune small weights to delete small weights like 0.001 and so on.

Erik

[BoostAbuse]

I always perform an initial bind first, I flood the entire characters weights to the pelvis joint and then I set my brush to Opacity 1 and Value 1 and start painting in the areas at full value. Once I've blocked in all my weight values, I start adding poses to the rig and begin to scrub my timeline through different poses and start smoothing weights or adding weights as I do. As I begin to refine the weighting I like to use some vertex weighting tools I have so I can fine tune single vertices or edge loops of verts.

As a general rule I add influences when fine tuning using 1.0 opacity and 0.2 for my value and if I need to remove weighting then I paint at 0.5 opacity and 0 as my value.

If there are areas that need some extra support then I'll see if I can work in some extra weighting to help support problematic areas or I'll add some extra influences and blend the weighting in.

When everything is done I like to scan the mesh to make sure I don't have many stray vertices that could pose problems, prune influences and do a once over with a smooth brush to polish off some areas.

If you're a max user, check out skinOrDie2 as it's a great toolset for skinning characters.

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