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Chapter List
Page Two
Spine Placement
Page Three
Neck and Head
Page Four
Attaching Neck/Spine
Page Five
Begin Orient Constraints
Page Six
Orients Continued
Page Seven
Pelvis, Leg, and Foot
Page Eight
Clavicle, Arm, and Hand
Page Nine
Arm, and Hand continued
Page Ten
Keeping Things Organized
Page Twelve
Character Skinning, Part Two
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My character is a one piece body construction. It's pretty low in the Polygon
count as well.
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The teeth, hair, eyes, gloves and shoes are the only things that are
seperate pieces of geometry.
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Even though the pic to the left shows a lot of joints, only certain joints
are actually going to be skinned to the character. All the JCon's, JOri's and JEnd's
never get skinned to your character. Only the bones that are actually
animated will be skinned.
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The joints are selected through the outliner. Use the "Ctrl" select to
pick only the JA, JB, JC (etc) for the skin you will attach.
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Using Smooth Bind, open the Dialog Box. Select the options, "Selected Joints".
I chose the Closest Joint bind method, as opposed to closest distance. There
is a lot of different settings to tailor to your character.
Maya's help files, as well as the provided books, can explain their differences better
than I can. But most of the work will come later when you have to clean
up your skinning process.
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I do the same thing for each hand, seperately. Again only selecting
the JA, JB, JC, and JD's on the hand. If you haven't used any other tools
since the last skinning procedure, you cna use the hotkey "g" to repeat
the last skinning procedure.
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Since I have this hand skinned, I'll show you why it's important during
the setup procedure to have all your bones start at 0, 0, 0 rotation values.
A lot of effort is put into setting up your skeleton using only the
Joint Orient Attributes for this reason.
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As an extreme example: Say some rotate values on your hand got messed up during.
Or you purposely moved the fingers around to check motion and deformations.
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Even before skinning, things might have been moved by accident.
To fix this, just select all the hand joints (Everything except
the JCon).
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Then it's just a matter of typing in all zeroes in the rotate values.
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Everything snaps back into place.
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Another quick note to mention is the triple shoulder joint we created earlier.
You will not need to bind your skin to all three of them. Just the lowest in the
chain (the ZRot) needs to be skinned.
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It's not time to use the paint wieghts tools yet for cleaning up your
skinning. But this is the best and quickest way to see if you
accidentally bound any JCon's (etc.). After all, mistakes do happen.
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In the next chapter I'll attach the feet and hair and setup the eyes.
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