Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Skinning

Skinning is the process with which you tell Blender how bones should deform the meshes. To do this, you’ll use weights: each bone has an influence (weight) over the vertices to define how those vertices will follow the movement of the bones. Let’s see how weights work with a simple example.

Take a look at Figure 11.10 to see how weights work in a mesh. In the left image, you can see that there is a simple model, a cylinder, with two bones inside it. In the center image, you see the weight of the bone at the top: red means the bone has 100% influence, while dark blue means the bone has no influence at all; all the colors in between (orange, yellow, and green) indicate intermediate amounts of influence between 0 and 100 percent. In the ...