Rigid skin objects and
points
During rigid skinning, you bind one or more deformable objects to a skeleton. Once bound, the objects are rigid skin objects (or skin objects, or skin) whose position, orientation, and scale are controlled by the skeleton’s joints. The points (CVs, vertices, or lattice points) of the deformable objects are then referred to as rigid skin points, or skin points.
Maya binds rigid skin objects to joints by means of joint cluster nodes. One way you can change the rigid skinning deformation effects is by editing joint cluster attributes (or channels).