During smooth skinning, you bind deformable objects to a skeleton. After smooth skinning, the deformable objects are called smooth skin objects (or skin objects, or skin). The points of the deformable objects (NURBS CVs, polygonal vertices, or lattice points) are then referred to as smooth skin points, or skin points.
Maya creates a set of the smooth skin points for each deformable object. The set contains all the points (NURBS CVs, polygonal vertices, or lattice points) that can be influenced by the skeleton. (See also Sets and partitions.)
As you smooth bind skin, for each smooth skin point, Maya assigns a weight value for each joint that influences that point. These values control the amount of influence of that joint on each skin point. Adjusting these skin point weights lets you control the deformation of your smooth skin objects.
By default, joints closer to a smooth skin point have a greater influence than joints far from the skin point. The joint closest to a smooth skin point will have the greatest influence. You can also use interactive skin binding, and use volume manipulators to set rough initial weights. During interactive binding, Maya creates a manipulator to represent the falloff of each influence, and you then scale and move the manipulators to set initial weight values. See Use interactive bind for smooth skinning.
Which joints have the next greatest influence by default depends on how you set the Bind Method in the Smooth Bind Options. This setting lets you determine whether you want Maya to consider the skeleton’s hierarchy during binding or to ignore the skeleton’s hierarchy during binding. For more details on the options for setting initial skin weights as you bind skin, see Bind methods for smooth skinning.
If you want to change the results of smooth skinning to create unique skeletal deformation effects, you edit or paint the weights of smooth skinning at the point level (the CV, vertex, or lattice point level). To add further deformation effects to smooth skin, you can use Maya’s deformers and smooth skin influence objects.