Techniques for Effective Character Skinning in Maya
This course shows how to effectively bind a model to a rig by using the most efficient skinning techniques in Maya. Enhance your deformation by adding blend shapes, and let them be driven by reading the appropriate poses of your rig. Software required: Maya.
What you'll learn
Creating a character rig is only half the work of the rigging process, and easily done by using auto rigs. However, connecting a rig to your character model is the challenging part. In this course, Techniques for Effective Character Skinning in Maya, you'll learn how a humanoid character model will be bound to Maya’s quick rig to demonstrate a skinning technique that effectively leads to an appealing deformation. First, you'll explore joint placement and what to watch out for when defining your joints position. Next, you'll discover a workflow that allows you to create a perfectly functioning skinning, along with taking a look at how to twist joints. Finally, you'll dive into corrective blend shapes, which will be applied to make the deformation work efficiently. By the end of this course, you'll have the necessary knowledge to create any deformation on a desired pose in Maya. Software required: Maya.
Table of contents
- Binding the Geometry to the Skeleton 4m
- Define Head and Neck Weights with the Paint Skin Weights Tool 6m
- Smooth Weighting in the Transition Area 6m
- Keep Control Over Your Skinning 6m
- Using the Selection Mode in the Paint Skin Weights Tool 5m
- Prepare for a Flawless Skinning Workflow 5m
- Create a Hard-weighting for All Joints of the Leg 4m
- Smooth the Transition Areas of the Leg 7m
- Apply this Workflow to the Rest of the Body 5m
- Identify Areas, Where Other Methods Than Skinning Will Be Needed 3m
- Create Roll/twist Joints with the HumanIK Rig 4m
- Add the Twist Joints to the Skin and Prepare for Weight Editing 3m
- Edit the Weighting for the Twist Joints 6m
- Manually Create the Twist Joint for the Lower Arm 6m
- Create the First Twist Joint for the Upper Arm 4m
- Create the Second Twist Joint for the Skinning 8m
- Create a Corrective Shape for the Knee 5m
- Let This Blend Shape Be Driven by the Knee Rotation 6m
- Why a Blend Shape Can Not Be Driven by the Rotation of the Hip 4m
- Connect the Corrective Shapes by Using the Pose Editor 7m
- Downsides of Using the Pose Editor 5m
- Using Distance Nodes to Connect the Corrective Shapes 8m
- Creating a Corrective Shape for Sideways Hip Movements 9m
About the author
Carla Heinzel is a professor of technical art at the German University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, where she teaches 3D art for games and animated movies. She began her career studying animation at a German film academy and later worked for movies, such as 2012, The Immortals, and Cloud Atlas. Being a 3D artist she has experience in almost every department of a 3D production, from modeling to simulation, but her focus was always character rigging. After some years working for the film industr... more