Skinning

Skinning is the process of binding deformable objects to a skeleton. Typically, the deformable objects are NURBS or polygonal surfaces. These geometry objects become the character’s surface, or skin, and their shapes are influenced by the action of the skeleton’s joints.

Once you’ve built a skeleton for a character, you can bind the model to the skeleton using smooth skinning. You can also use indirect skinning methods, which combine the use of lattice or wrap deformers with smooth skinning. See Skinning with lattice deformers.

After you create a model and skeleton for your character, you skin the model so that the skeleton’s actions can deform it.

You can either use smooth skinning or rigid skinning to deform the character’s skin. You can also skin the influence lattices of lattice deformers or the wrap influence objects of wrap deformers either by smooth or rigid skinning.

Important: 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.

Skinning a character is an iterative process in which you edit and refine the skeleton and the model’s deformable objects until you get the right skin deformation effects.