Understanding skin binding

00:04

OK. With the joints selected, let's look at skinning. The model,

00:09

add the model to the selection,

00:12

go to skin, find skin and open the options.

00:16

I'll reset this.

00:18

As you can see, we have lots of options here.

00:21

First, we want to change bind, so it will only bind to the selected joints.

00:26

We don't want the full hierarchy.

00:28

We also want to change maximum influences to four.

00:32

This dictates how many joints can affect each vertex.

00:36

And again,

00:37

the more influences you have the bigger impact it will have on the game engine

00:41

four is usually the amount to use, but it depends on the target platform.

00:46

So it's always best to check

00:48

if you have to change this later on, it will involve repainting a lot of skin weights.

00:52

So it's good to know from the outset.

00:56

Let's supply this and see what we get.

01:00

So the first thing we see is that half the skeleton is now color coded.

01:05

This is an option in the settings,

01:07

but it indicates it's now skinned.

01:09

Don't worry if it's just colored half the skeleton like here.

01:13

It has only done this because of our joint selection.

01:16

If you want the full skeleton to be colored,

01:18

you can instead bind the full joint hierarchy

01:21

and then manually remove the joints you don't need from the model skin cluster.

01:26

Speaking of which

01:28

you can now see the model has a skin cluster node attached,

01:32

this stores all the skinning information.

01:35

We can now also move the skeleton and the model follow us.

01:41

Let's change the view.

01:44

That's better.

01:45

So what we have are the default weights, which is a starting point.

01:50

As you can see the arm doesn't deform in the right way just yet.

01:55

Let's look at the fingers.

01:56

They are a good place to test how things are deforming.

02:03

You see this finger looks very soft and spongy.

02:07

Yes, we can fix this by adjusting the weight,

02:09

but we could also save ourselves some time

02:12

by experimenting with the other skinning options.

02:16

Let's reset the pause.

02:19

An alternative way to reset the pose of a skinned model

02:22

is to select, go to bind pose under the skin menu.

02:27

OK. We want to remove the skinning information now, so we can reapply it

02:31

this time. Go to un bind skin.

02:35

This is a much simpler window with just a few options,

02:39

you can choose to delete the history which removes the skin cluster completely.

02:45

Keep the history, which will instead detach the skeleton but keep the skin cluster.

02:50

This is useful if you need to make some minor adjustments to the skeleton,

02:54

but don't want to lose the skin weights

02:57

to then reattach it.

02:58

You need to use the bind skin option again,

03:00

but it will instead use an existing skin cluster rather than creating a new one.

03:05

Finally, you can bake the history.

03:08

This will make the model retain its current pose and position

03:11

to effectively bake the defamation into the model.

03:15

Let's apply that

03:19

OK. Good.

03:20

The model is free again.