Lesson 5 - Skinning

With all the joints created for each part of the body, you can parent them together. 

• Join the base of the spine to the top of the leg joints
• Join the 2nd from top spine joint to the shoulders
• Join the top of the spine to the base of the head

You'll have a complete skeleton! Now we need to attach weights to the skin so that the joints affect the correct part.
To begin with, select all the joints (This can usually be done by selecting the pelvis joint) followed by the mesh.Go to Skin > Smooth Bind and open the skin options and change to these settings.

Once you bind the skin, you can enter 'Paint Skin Weights Tool' by holding right click on the mesh to access the Marquee menu.

Here you'll get a tools setting window which looks like this:

In this window you can select the joints in the top part of the window. Once you do this you'll see white and black regions on the skin.

White = 100% weighted
Black = 0% weighted

It is possible to blend between these to change the percentage of influence.

The paint operations control how the brush or paint applies.

Replace = Removing previous weighting for new weight value
Add = Layers current weight value on top of the old weight value
Smooth = Blend weight values between vertices

The Value option is what current skin weight value you're using is. In the example it's 0 meaning black.

Here you can see an example of the weights painted on and how it fades from white to black at the end of the joint. In this case the influence is being changed on the Lft_Leg_Hip joint.

You can switch between painting black and white by holding Ctrl. Paint the weights onto the skin for each joint and you'll have a functioning rig.