Character Skin-Weighting Techniques in Maya
Throughout these lessons, we will build a skeleton for our character model, learn about joint orientations and their impact on deformations, and skin-weight the entire character from beginning to end. Software required: Maya 2015.
What you'll learn
Throughout these lessons, we will build a skeleton for our character model, learn about joint orientations and their impact on deformations, and skin-weight the entire character from beginning to end. We'll cover things to look for in the model that will cause issues with deformation down the road. We'll even go over editing the model to fix any errors that will inhibit us. Many skin-weighting techniques and tools are discussed and used throughout the course. You'll also learn how to transfer weights between meshes, how to mirror skinning on asymmetrical meshes, what to look for when skinning to ensure the best deformations, and we'll finish by creating a "Range of Motion" (ROM) animation and putting our character in a pose, which will test our skinning out. By the end of the course, you should have a firm grasp on the techniques needed and used to get great looking deformations on your characters. Software required: Maya 2015.
Table of contents
- Checking Our Model 10m
- Creating Base Skeleton 10m
- Placing Leg Joints 10m
- Building the Spine Skeleton 10m
- Completing the Arm Skeleton 10m
- Building the Finger Skeleton 10m
- Wrapping up Our Joint Placement 10m
- Removing Unneeded Geometry 4m
- Beginning the Jacket 10m
- Skinning the Jacket to the Spine Joints 11m
- Editing the Jacket 11m
- Editing Model and Transfer Weights 11m
- Adding Weighting to Spine Joints 11m
- Polishing the Spine 10m
- Adding Clavicles to Weighting 10m
- Finishing the Clavicle Weighting 11m
- Adding Twist Joints for Arms 5m
- Skinning Upper Arm Twists 11m
- Skinning Upper Arm Joints 11m
- Weighting the Lower Arm Bones 10m
- Wrapping up Our Jacket Weighting 6m
- Skinning the Shirt 10m
- Weighting the Tie, Pockets, and Button 6m
- Beginning the Hands 9m
- Weighting the Index and Middle Fingers 11m
- Finishing the Middle and Ring Fingers 10m
- Weighting the Pinky and Thumb Joints 10m
- Wrapping up Hand and Finger Weighting 11m
- Weighting the Head 10m
- Finishing the Head Weighting 11m
- Skinning the Additional Pieces 6m
- Adding Twist Joints 11m
- Finishing the Thigh Weighting 10m
- Weighting Calf-twists and Foot 12m
- Weighting the Shoes 9m
- Adding Jacket Helper Joints 11m
- Weighting the Jacket Front 11m
- Skinning the Back Helper 10m
- Mirroring and Cleanup 10m
- Fixing Mirroring 11m
- Polishing Our Helper Joints 6m
- Creating the Range of Motion 11m
- Finalizing the Range of Motion 12m
- Final Posing Test 9m
About the author
Jeremy currently works at Riot Games as a Principal Technical Artist. He was formerly at Epic Games, as the Lead Technical Animator. He builds rigs, writes animation pipeline tools, and completes various other technical tasks, like character deformations and cloth simulations. He's had the great opportunity to work on some amazing games so far in his career, like many games in the Gears of War series, Paragon, and Fortnite. He has also released the Animation and Rigging Toolkit with Unreal Engin... more