Post 35 - Jaw skinning

The rig is operational, but is not skinned. I should point out that I did not factor in having to learn the skinning process of rigging, but I am very pleased that I decided to jump into it and can now happily skin, so I have now skinned the head to the rig. However, their is a knack to skinning the jaw so that it deforms the skin correctly. Firstly, add the rig bones to the skin using a skin modifier on the head (standard procedure). Play with the envelopes. When as good as they can be, bake the envelopes and finish the job by painting influence. HOWEVER, the jaw needs to allow the jaw bone to rotate and stretch the skin from the top to the bottom. Essentially, you need the majority of the influence on the actual jaw and have it fade out towards the cheek area. Also, special attention needs to be made to the neck. There are a couple of methods for doing this level of tweaking.

One is by painting with a very low value. Another is to use the blend paint weights tool, which reads the surrounding area and normalises the verts, but this can be tricky if the brush is too large as you'll spend ages going back and forth. My favourite method to get true control on a single point basis is by allowing for vertices to be selectable. Then by using a slider called Absolute influence, you can refine it's influence on the mesh and get an instant feedback as to how it looks. This is good for when verts get lost under geometry and you need to fish them out. So I would recommend block painting, then blending verts and then using the Absolute vertex manipulation tool for any renegade geometry.


Also, animating the jaw to open and close as a great way of getting feedback as to how it looks in motion.






Jaw skinning - LINK