Essential Skills in Character Rigging

Chapter 8

Skinning a Character

8.1 What is Skinning?

“Skinning” a character is a term you will hear a lot when it comes to character rigging. It means that you are going to create a deformation method for the joints in a skeleton to control the movement of the vertices in a character mesh or meshes. Skinning allows the transforms of the joints to control the vertex offset, based on the pivot point of the joint. It is the primary method of deformation for any character using joints.

8.2 How Does Skinning Work?

Skinning is a special kind of a deformer that works exclusively with Joints and polygon vertices or NURBS CVs. It creates a “skin cluster,” which is a fancy form of a Cluster Deformer, but instead of using Cluster handles, it simply uses ...