Maya offers many choices when it comes to how a character's geometry will be influenced by a skeleton. Smooth Bind allows for overlapping membership where any vertex can be influenced by the rotation of multiple joints - a conceptually naturalistic approach. Yet if the character's geometry is heavy, be it NURBS, Polygons or Sub-D, the weighting process can become cumbersome, and performance can suffer. In this video we look at an indirect skinning approach which works for any geometry type, where we add wrap deformers to our high-res geometry which then get Smooth Bound. The workflow of creating the wrap deformer geometry, assigning the wraps, placing joints and skinning are all thoroughly addressed.
