Skinning the robot to the skeleton in a rigid way
In the previous chapter, we learned how to paint the skin weights with the Skin Weight Painting tool. However, there's also another more direct and exact way to assign specific skin weights to specific vertices on our 3D model. In the case of our robot, this is the perfect situation to try this method.
Our robot has rigid, solid, and unbendable separate moving parts. In this case, we know that every moving part will have to follow their bones 100%. Rather than weight painting each part at 100% after assigning Automatic Skin Weights, we will do so in a different way to speed up the process.
As always, let's make sure our model is ready before we skin.
Preparing the model and collapsing modifiers
If parts of the robot model have modifiers applied to them, such as Mirror, it may complicate how we select the vertices for our skinning process, we need to remove them. To find out if you have modifiers on any of the...