Basic rules to make skinning in Maya easy and effective

 Rule 1 – The time

The skinning in Maya is always time consuming. Don’t think you will finish the job in 2 hours. When you perform skinning on humanoid, it will take 8-10 hours of intensive work (and I speak only about skinning, not modeling, not setting up skeleton, etc…). Sometimes less, sometimes more – it all depends on complexity of your character.

Rule 2 – The correct orientation

The correct location of joints and correct orientation of joints is very important. If you place joints in bad or anatomically incorrect locations, your character cannot be smoothly and simply animated. Every body in CGI works in a similar way to a real body, not exactly but very similar.
And orientation of joints – this is a basic need for good movement of your character. Do not forget every important joint in the human body moves in circles. You need all the joints oriented in the way of the preceding bone. So the joint will not perform some nonsense or unnatural rotations – see picture examples.

Example of the bad orientation

Example of the bad orientation

Example of the good orientation

Example of the good orientation

Rule 3 – The name conventions

It is necessary to name all the joints you have created. When you paint the skin weights you can see and associate the name of the joint to its placement in the body.

Rule 4 – Save the resources

This is a rule concerning the final skinning. Don’t bind the casino games online skin to the joints, which will not do any movement – you will save in both the time and performance of your computer. Bind it all explicitly: select all the joints you want to bind the skin onto and select casino autorizzati the geometry. Then perform the tool for binding skin.

Rule 5 – Beginners advice

If you are beginner use the default settings for binding geometry to the skeleton first. Developers from Alias know very well what to do. 🙂 After you understand everything you can start experimenting with all kinds of attributes in the option boxes to see changes in progress. But only do it after you really know what you are doing.

 

Rule 6 – About the geometry

Prepare the model in a topological way, which is corresponding to the real anatomy of your character. It is hard, but you can learn it. Use the simplest geometry you can. The skinning is a very processor-time consuming process. For effective time usage, use the proxy models for skinning and smooth (highres) models for rendering.

Example of the skinning

Rule 7 – Be patient

Character setup is the most difficult part of CGI, especially in the case of humanoids, or people themselves. You can see everyday people around you, so you know them in every detail. And mostly it will take some time to achieve good or realistic effects. Of course you can be a very good student and manage everything quite fast, it really just depends on you. But if the success will not come immediately, please be patient it is normal.

Good luck! Wink