Rigid skin objects and points

During rigid skinning, you bind one or more deformable objects to a skeleton. Once bound, the objects are rigid skin objects (or skin objects, or skin) whose position, orientation, and scale are controlled by the skeleton’s joints. The points (CVs, vertices, or lattice points) of the deformable objects are then referred to as rigid skin points, or skin points.

Maya binds rigid skin objects to joints by means of joint cluster nodes. One way you can change the rigid skinning deformation effects is by editing joint cluster attributes (or channels). (See Edit joint cluster channels and attributes.)

Note: Rigid Bind menu options have been removed from Maya to streamline other workflows. Rigid Bind functionality is still present using the scripting commands provided in the Rigid skinning topic. You can also obtain a Rigid bind using smooth skin with 1 influence per vertex.

Rigid skin point weights

During rigid skinning, for each rigid skin point (for example, each CV of each NURBS surface), Maya assigns a rigid skin point weight that controls the influence of a joint on the point (for example, the CV). By default, each joint influences the skin points of its nearest skin object equally, but you can edit the amount a joint can influence a skin point.

The main difference between rigid skinning and smooth skinning is that in rigid skinning only one joint can influence a particular skin point (CV, vertex, or lattice point), but in smooth skinning, many joints can influence the same skin point.