Rigging and Skinning

The rig (skeleton) for the character is already provided, but we have to bind the clothes to it, so they move the way we want. This is called skinning.

Skinning involves painting “weights” over the geometry that we want to bind to the skeleton. Color scale goes from red to blue. If we paint a certain part of the geometry red, that means it will follow the bone 100%, and if we paint it blue, it means it won’t be affected by that bone. This is an example of the skinning of the arm of the avatar:

What we are seeing is that the arm bone is affecting a lot the surrounding area (in red) and it fades as we get far away from the bone, and the rest of the body is blue because it’s not being affected by that bone. Here we have a short tutorial that shows the skinning process a little bit more in-depth: