Skinning and boning at last (although its not been as easy as I had hoped)

Where to start? How about the beginning?

So as you are all aware I have finished modelling the Inca Hanan and he now need the means to be animated.

Boning.

I have decided to use a biped as I have not used one of these before for my animations (at least not in the proper way). Here is where I noticed my first problem, a long time ago I had added a mesh smooth to the character which caused problems with the symmetry, turned out the best way to solve the issue was to collapse the stack and weld vertices together, I now have a man at 200,000 polys and believe me when I say it is slow going getting this all done, lesson learned, never collapse the stack until you are done. Moving swiftly past my, errrm, error, I have got the full joints in my character so my biped has them all too.

Boning turned out to be the easy part, as my model is defiantly a symmetry I simply lined up the left hand side of his body, then using the copy and paste opposite pose option I cloned the pose over. Done.

Skinning.
Now the hard part, First off I set some keyframes 10 or 20 keys apart of the biped moving the arms and legs up and down so that during the skinning process I can jump to various poses to see how the mesh is deforming. Problem 2 was that when I moved to the first pose this happened.

It looks like the skeleton’s soul is trying to pull away. This problem took me hours to figure out but I eventually opened up the weights table to look at all the (200,000) vertices to see what was affecting them all. Turns out one of the fingers was affecting every single vertex. As you can see from below, with the finger selected none of the body should be affected but, it is affecting the weight of almost every one, strongly too.

Somehow the envelope for this bone ended up miles away from the body, encompassing everything. (That’s the body in the middle, just really far away).

Once I had this problem under wraps the rest fell in to place with relative ease, it was simply a case of resizing envelopes and adding drifting vertices to their relevant envelopes.

Now, from the next image you can see that the shoulder is not deforming correctly, I have tried and tried to fix this problem but it will just not have it so I am going to cloth over it to hide it, cheap fix to a problem I know but its week 7 and I really need to crack on with this. Finally, from the same image you will notice the left shoulder (his left) has a crease down it, this is because I have not changed the vertex weights on the left, I am going to mirror them from the right using the mirror panel in the skin modifier settings.