Weighting

The next step in rigging the mesh was the weighting. This means making sure that all of the vertices are being influenced by the right bones. To do this I first selected the whole skeleton and the mesh and then clicked on skin > smooth bind. I then put some animation on parts of the rig which would allow me to see what parts of the rig are being influenced by the wrong bones and allow me to correct them. The first method of correcting this was to select the mesh and then right click and select paint skin weights tool. this allows you to select the bone you want on the left hand side and it will show you on the mesh which vertices are being effected by painting them white. This tool allows you to re paint areas so that the bone selected controls anything you have painted white and doesn’t control anything you have removed the white from. This is a good way to organize the weighting for any parts that would be influenced by more than one bone such as the knee or on the lips so this is where i used this. The second way I sorted out the weighting of the rig was with the component editor which allows you to select the vertices you want and then type in a number for how effected they are by all the bones 0 is no influence and 1 is that bone is the only one that has influence on that vertex. This is helpful for all of the long areas of the mesh that would only be influenced by one bone. Such as the thigh, shin, forearm or upper arm. Once I was happy that all of the weighting on my mesh was correct the rig was finished, i could now hide all of the joints and control the rig solely with the controllers.