your thoughts on good animation/rigging practice
 

i just got told that it's considerd bad practice to directly skin a model to a skeleton.

so just binding a mesh to a skeleton is bad

the reasoning was that if you end up changing the mesh later on then you'd have to slightly adjust a few weight, if lucky, otherwise you'd have to rebind everything, if not so lucky

i haven't seen an animation tutorials before but i thought skinning the model onto the skeleton was the only way to do it...

how would you do it in a way so that if you change the model you dont have to play with the weights?

Well, I usually just bind the mesh to the skeleton, and if the model needs changing later on. I decided whether it's that important, that I want to re-bind the model... Yeah thats probably bad practice, but I'm not an animator... yet. When I rig a model it's only for posing.

Though if I were in a production setting. I would most likely keep the Model away from the skeleton as long as possible.
I would rig a Dummy with my skeleton, and do all my animation with it, and when the time came. I would bind the actual model to the Animated skeleton. This is what allot of people do, So guess it works well.

By the time you get to the rigging stage you should have all the modeling portion signed off anyway (in a production environment)
If you have one mesh to rig, for example a human which is all one piece of geo, then I would say just go ahead and do a normal bind.

If the model is broken up into sections and is extremely complex, like for example a robot or similar. Then I would group the sections (like right leg, left leg etc) together and do a parent constrain to the joints, this will simply make it easier for searching through a hypergraph.

that's a pretty good point. I'm sure i can trust the word of a freelancer on that ;)

but what happens if the boss later decides he wants a few drastic changes?

Wrap deformer?

FTW

whats that laurie, any good? sounds pro though lol :p

i see your profile says your occupation in animation, Laurie... feel free to share your coolness :)

lol, a wrap deformer is like a lattice but you define the cage yourself with geometry.

So lets say you have a high res character that continually requires updates and changes frequently. Now rather than binding this mesh to the joints directly, a lower poly version of the character that has been modified to fit around the high res character can be bound tothe joints, then a wrap deformer can be used to have the low res bound mesh drive the high res mesh.

look it up in the help docs, for details on usage. It saves huge time on skinning since you dont have to deal with the details, and when you make changes to the high res sculpt there is far less work to do.

wow sounds like a pretty neat opition...