Animate a Humanoid Character - Blender 2.5 - page 256

Skinning

Now we must establish the way the armature is going to affect the mesh. For this, it is
necessary to relate each bone to a set of verices and also deine the amount of inluence
that it will have over them. This type of "relaionship" between bones and verices is called
skinning. The way Blender does skinning is by assigning an influence value on each vertex for
each bone: 0 means no inluence, while 1 means full inluence. The actual tools for creaing
this "weighing" are weight paining or using the automaic populaion of those collecions
of data; we'll just go on with the automaic method, which gives us a weighing that is good
enough for our purposes, but can also be tweaked with the other method if needed.

Engage Thrusters
Let's switch the char_skel armature to Edit Mode to perform a couple of tweaks to avoid
geing a bad skinning result.

Select the root bone, then go to the Bone tab of the Properties Editor and disable
the Deform panel. Do the same for the footIK.L and footIK.R bones. The reason
to perform this operaion is simple—these bones are a part of the mechanism
of our armature; their job is not to deform the mesh, but to control other bones,
so we must speciically tell Blender that they should not be used for calculaing
deformaions. Now let's switch to Object Mode .

1.

2. Select the character object (mesh), then, also select the char_skel object (both

objects must be selected now), and go to Object → Parent → Set . Then choose
With Automatic Weights from the list. This will tell Blender to perform a special
calculaion to try to determine how each bone must afect the mesh, and set up the
diferent coniguraion seings needed for the correct relaionship to be established
(adding a modiier and populaing vertex groups).

Now let's select only the character object, then go to the Modiiers tab of the
Properties Editor , locate the Armature modifier that was placed below the
Subdivision Surfaces modifier (thus being applied after it), and click on the arrow
poining up to get it moved to the irst place in the modiiers list. This will cause
the armature to affect the mesh before the Subdivision Surfaces modifier is
applied. Now let's enable the Quaternion opion and disable the Bone Envelopes
opion of the modiier, to improve the deformaion (quaternion) and to not use
the bone envelopes method for deformaion (using only the vertex groups created
automaically by Blender when using the With Automatic Weights opion).

3.