To bind my skeleton with my mesh, I simply went into the 'Smooth Bind Options' and changed the settings to as followed. This is an important step because it will allow me to actually move my whole model and not just its skeleton.
An important thing to remember for myself and for when I rig my own model and get to binding, is that I should not select the end joints of the fingers, eyes and feet, and to make my way around the model without pressing the root. This will allow me to click and bind all the right joints in the right order, so I don't have to go back and fix several problems later on.
One major mistake that I did encounter, was when I went to paint the weights on my model's jaw area, I couldn't seem to open the mouth. I'm not sure if I mistakenly merged the vertices together which means that I cannot go back to fix it or if I somehow damaged the mouth mesh? I have tried to open it and add more edge loops but nothing seems to work, but I still carried on with painting the other weights on the skin.
This is the inside of the mouth which shows that there is a gap for the mouth to open, however it just would not do it for me!
Despite this issue, I found painting weights turned out to be my favourite part so far! I really enjoyed painting weights on the skin, I found it really satisfying and I tried to be as precise as I possibly could. I mostly used the 'replace' option, to get rid of relationships between the joints that weren't supposed to be there. For example, if I clicked on the clavicle joint and the hand was highlighted, then there was a wrong influence there and I could 'paint' over it to clear it up.
This is more apparent on my model in these two pictures above. On the left image, I had clicked on the left leg joint, however the right knee appeared to be influenced as well as the right side of the hips, therefore I painted over this as shown in the right image and I was able to fix the issues right up.
Another useful tool I used was the 'Smooth' option. This was very helpful for places that had sharp crevices/angles, like the ankle, so by smoothing this area, when I then want to bend the foot in an animation, it will look more fluid and realistic, as opposed to sharp and unsightly.
The left side of the this image has been painted and cleaned up, where as the right has not. As you can see the right arm looks like it sits more naturally on the body, where as the left is a bit more stiff.
Lastly I tackled the hands. When I first moved the joints on the fingers I thought my mesh had done something extremely problematic, like I had with the mouth, as it appeared that the two fingers were joined together! However I stuck with painting weights, and I ended up having to move the fingers upwards as well as down to get rid of all the bad influences, and as a result they turned out looking smooth and normal.
I really enjoyed this part of the model making because I found that I could really see what I was changing and often at times, I didn't need to keep looking back at the tutorial because I became so invested in cleaning all the influences up!
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