Smooth Skinning or Rigid Skinning?

[keo]

Hi, I prefer using smooth skinning to bind character rather that rigid skinning.
But rigid skinning almost used in most of the character's tutorials.
Is that mean rigid skinning better that smooth skinning?

pls advice.

Thanks.

[jwilson]

Smooth skinning requires more effort than rigid skinning because a single vertex/CV can be affected by multiple joints, thus painting those weights takes time. Also flexors are used in rigid skinning where with smooth skinning you can use smooth skin deformers (i.e. place a sphere under the skin and scale it when the arm bends to simulate muscle bulge) The great part about using these smooth skin deformers is you can have multiple pieces of geometry which can mimic actual muscle groups. Again it's a lot of extra work and should only reall be used when precise detail work is necessary.

Jeff

[charliebrown]

Smooth skinning can also make your model very very very S L O W to animate. This really is annoying since other packages like Softimage have ALWAYS (well, at least for several years) had skinning based on multiple joint weighting and have never been so slow. Maybe Maya v.3 will be a little more efficient in this area(?)