Skin Weighting the Damned

Laura Bultman

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I’ve been working on our antagonist the “Damned” since the beginning. I created the concept art off of a suggestion by another teammate. Then I began modeling the damned in Maya, transferred it to ZBrush to add more detail, and then sent it to Aubrey for retopologizing. After Katherine rigged the Damned, I took on the job of skin weighting.

Concept art for the Damned

I have had very minimal knowledge on skin weighting before so this was a new challenge for me. I began with a lot of research and teachings from Kat. I then began working on my own deciding to work from the middle, down, then jump back to the top. The torso was the easiest part of the model to weight so I decided to knock that out first. I then moved into the skirt, this proved to be the hardest out of all of the weighting I did. The problems that I ran into appeared underneath the skirt. I had to eliminate any attachments to the legs under the skirt and given the angle I was going from, proved to be trouble. I also found during this step that sometimes while skin weighting one section, skin weight will be added into another. When I finished the job of the skirt getting it looking good, I moved onto the limbs, starting with the legs. The legs, arm and head seemed like smooth sailing after the challenge of the skirt. Now that I have finished skin weighting I will be moving onto animating the Damned.