Skinning is the process of binding deformable objects to a skeleton. Typically, the deformable objects that are bound are NURBS or polygonal surfaces. These geometry objects become the character’s surface, or skin, and their shapes are influenced by the action of the skeleton’s joints. Once you’ve built a skeleton for a character, you can skin your character by using a smooth skinning method or a rigid skinning method.
Because influence lattices are deformable objects, you can also bind them to a skeleton by smooth or rigid skinning. In turn, these can influence the NURBS or polygonal surfaces that provide the character’s skin.
In skinning with lattice deformers, you create lattice deformers for the deformable objects that you want to use for the character’s skin. Then you bind the influence lattices to the skeleton. The result is that the skeleton’s movement influences the objects indirectly through the lattice deformers. Meanwhile, you can manipulate the influence lattices for more control over the deformation. This approach, skinning with lattice deformers, is called lattice skinning.
If you wish, you could use lattice skinning to skin an entire character. A more common approach is to use smooth or rigid skinning for much of the character’s skin, but then also to use lattice skinning for finer control over certain areas. In many situations, lattice skinning can provide superior smoothing effects, particularly in areas near where a character’s limbs and main body meet (for example, a shoulder and armpit area). However, if you do use lattice skinning with smooth or rigid skinning, you need to be very careful about how all the many control points (CVs, polygonal vertices, or lattice points) involved are organized. You will need to organize points into various sets and those sets into various partitions to make editing easier and to avoid double transformation effects.
For more information on skinning, see the Skinning chapter of the Character Setup Guide.
