Skinning
Skinning is the process with which you tell Blender how bones should deform the meshes. To do this, you’ll use weights: each bone has an influence (weight) over the vertices to define how those vertices will follow the movement of the bones. Let’s see how weights work with a simple example.
Take a look at Figure 11.10 to see how weights work in a mesh. In the left image, you can see that there is a simple model, a cylinder, with two bones inside it. In the center image, you see the weight of the bone at the top: red means the bone has 100% influence, while dark blue means the bone has no influence at all; all the colors in between (orange, yellow, and green) indicate intermediate amounts of influence between 0 and 100 percent. In the right image, you can see what happens with the model when you rotate the bone: the parts in red move exactly with the bone, while the parts of the model with medium influence (green and orange areas) average their movement between the bones affecting them. The parts with no influence from the bone (blue areas) don’t follow the bone’s movement at all.
