UV Mapping
 

Is it preferable to have your mesh UV mapped, before you bind the skin ?

Hi, Technically you could skin without UV mapping but i would recommend that you do create the map first for a number of reasons. It's just easier if you want to see stretching to have a texture applied even if it's only a uv map texture so that skin weighting will be less trouble and it will also let you save your weight maps so that if you need to reskin you can.