Joints and Skinning

Joints

Joints are the building blocks of skeletons and their points of articulation. Also, joints have no shape and therefore can not be rendered. Each joint can have one or more bone attached to it, and more than one child joint. Joints let you transform a skeleton when posing and animating a bound model.

Skinning

Skinning is the process of binding deformable objects to a skeleton. Typically, the deformable objects are NURBS or polygonal surfaces. These geometry objects become the character’s surface, or skin, and their shapes are influenced by the action of the skeleton’s joints.

Advanced Rigging in Maya

Today I Rigged a model using the skeleton and then skinning it.  The Skeleton part where I added bones and joints was the easiest and was fun to do.  I added all the key joints such as the hip knee ankle etc which let the joint rotate on the spot.  One I had the joints lined up I Added a skin which makes the bones become apart of the mesh.  This allows the body to move with the joints so the model has a realistic look.  I have started to replace the skin weights as some of the body parts rotate with other joints that are far away.