Rigging and skinning

Rigged Hand

Rigging and skinning are two features in Maya that are especially useful when it comes to creating animations for living things, using the rigging tool you can create joints which will move the mesh that they are on, in the picture at the top of this post you will see a fully rigged hand, the rigging process simply involved placing joints along the hand where the joints would be on a persons hand, using these joints you can bend the hand and move it however you like.

Inside the rigging tool there are many different things you can do, for example if you look at the ring finger on this hand, you can see that it bends quite unnaturally, if you wanted to you could put a limit on how far in either direction you could rotate the finger joint, meaning you could make the fingers only able to bend into a fist, or the way the hand looks in the original image.

Skinning is done after you have rigged your model, this shows you, using a heat map, how much moving a joint will affect certain areas of a mesh, so if you see red on the mesh, that means any changes to the joint selected will have a big effect on the mesh, but the blue on the edge means that the mesh will be mostly unaffected, you can change the amount each area is affected by the joint using the skin tool. This allows you to make sure only the areas of the mesh you want to move with the joints move and can help to avoid mesh deformation.