In this Skinning Class (2/2) We’ll finish the covering the fundamentals of skinning in Maya. This is the page that will really free us up in the skinning workflow with loads of tricks and tips that most students aren’t aware of in Maya. This will reveal some of the dark arts of skinning in Maya.

Now we’ll start to look deeper into the skinning tools to include workflows of mirroring, transferring skin weights between meshes, changing mesh topologies after skinning and other great tips like locking skin weights and vertex masking.

We’ll look at plugins that allow us to smooth skin weights intuitively unlike Maya’s in built smooth which at a first glance is buggy. We’ll look at how the smooth algorithms work in regards to pre and post skinning on the skinCluster, how we can switch between the two modes and why we would do so.

We’ll be leaving some of the skin tools for a later page, these will include the so called instant skinning like heat mapping and geodesic binding and the delta mush deformer. These tools are great to know too, but since they’re be unreliable/not appropriate in every situation we’ll leave those out of the fundamental skinning pages.

Most of our skinning workflow still revolves around the fundamental toolset and not the more fancy auto solutions which while they can be great in certain situations, those situations are rare and for the average student not worth exploring until they understand the fundamentals fully.

Running Time: 24 mins
Software: Maya 2016
Instructor: Andrew Silke