Skinning

Just been working on skinning lately. Skinning JD went pretty smooth. The mesh I got from Martin was really well made, and easy to work with, but I still had problems at a few areas. Elbows and knees were somewhat easy to fix with a Joint Area Deformer, and moving the vertexes around as needed at the max bend for each specific joint.

The shoulder proved to be harder to skin. The angle deform didn’t work there due to the shoulder being a bullet joint, and not a hinge joint. So I added two additional bones per shoulder with squash and stretch on them to make sure the vertexes didn’t dig into the mesh when the shoulder was animated.



The rig used is Puppetshop, which is a free 3Ds Max plugin. Its aviable at http://www.lumonix.net/puppetshop.html

The hips also proved difficult. And I can't say I was 100% happy with the result there, but it was good enough for the animation and poses we intended to do. So there was no reason to spend a lot of time skinning them perfectly. And it did work out in the movie.