What does the term Skinning mean in 3dsmax?

Hello Every body and welcome to Animations on HypefroActive. Well, last time we talked about 3dsmax custom bones. Today we'll be talking about skinning. So what is Skinning?

The 3dsmax 8 tutorial defines SKIN as a modifier "that associates a skeleton with a mesh, allowing you to animate the mesh by animating the skeleton. The Skin modifier works on simple animated structures as well as character meshes. You can use the modifier to control creasing and muscle bulging".
 What this means is that the SKIN is actually a modifier that is applied to the intended mesh to be animated enabling the mesh to choose the bones rigged for the purpose of animating or driving it. Breaking it down further, for you to create say a character animation,

1. You have to first create a model and maybe texture it if you want to.
2. Then you create the bone rigs to drive the model.
3. When 1 & 2 are in place, you add the skin modifier.

Without the skin modifier the bones cannot be associated with the mesh, thus will not drive the mesh. So if the Skin modifier is not added to the mesh to start with, the mesh cannot be driven and whatever animations passed on to the bone rig will not affect the mesh, meaning the bones will move when animated but not the mesh.

Two things, as a newbie i used to wonder what skinning meant, but then i was still in the modelling stage, very far away from animation. And when i finally got to the animation stage i learnt about it and i hated skinning. Why, you ask? Because it was difficult and took a lot of time. An object is just as good in appearance when its well skinned assuming "the model is ok". Skinning can be frustrating and alot of people 

ran from it. Skinning a character at that time could take me up to say three days and i still didnt get it right, just something manageable. But as i grew and kept on doing it, i got better and spent lesser time doing it,up to say plus or minus five hours. The key to skinning is NO MAGIC. It is not that simple either but it is straight forward. Certain bones drive certain parts of a mesh. Lets take the human arm again for instance, the arm bones in animation are divided into  five major joints beginning from the clavicle, the upper arm, lower arm, hand and fingers. Each of these bones drive or affect a certain part of the mesh and should have limits. A bone allotted the upper arm for instance should not have anything to do with the head or the lower body or legs or even the neck. A bone after affecting the portion it is supposed to drive could affect other adjacent bones for blending purposes so that the deformation happens naturally. 3dsmax skin envelopes affect meshes and display colours that blends from red, orange, yellow to blue with the colour red been the strongest points of influence on a mesh. Meaning wherever the colour red is, the bone in that section will greatly affect that part of the mesh. followed by orange, yellow and blue been the least.

 As seen in the picture on the left, the envelope affects the lower body but does not not blend out the colours naturally and that's why we have our mesh looking like that, clustered and in disarray, not well distributed around the part of the mesh been affected by the envelope. The one underneath it however is how it is supposed to look like. And as you can see, the mesh deforms with the colours blending out gracefully.

Skinning like all other topics in 3dsmax takes time but once you grasp it, the rest is cake-walk. However, You have to be patient and learn to use every tool thrown at you. They all are not necessary but you'll never know which works for you the most until you try. The images displayed here are again from 3dsmax 8 tutorials.