Fantastic Voyage: Bacteria and Leviathan Skinned

Finally I've finished skinning all of my models. It's been a very frustrating process to say the least, but I did it.  I also did some cleaning up to delete shaders and files that I was not using anymore and went back to attempt to remove seams. I feel these are now ready for animation, hopefully I can sort out a basic swim cycle since most of the scenes they are swimming around in the kelp. The video below looks a little funny but my bacteria probably wont be as flexible as the video below, I just used that animation to help me paint the weights.

Fantastic Voyage: Skinning Progress

After talking with Alan today and getting some advice, I think I'm finally making progress skinning my bacteria. I need to use rivets to keep things like the teeth, eyes and spines in place after using a high poly duplicate of my creature as a base that will later be hidden and my original model will be used to animate. So far things are sticking in the right places, I've also merged the spines and the flesh around the spines together so I hopefully only need to rivet a single object instead of two separate ones but we'll see how those work out. It's a repetitive long process and it took me a while to get the hang of it, but I think I get it and it seems to be working so far.

@Simon - Skinning

I've been trying to skin my bacteria for a few hours and even after combining my mesh I find the objects float off the model when I go and test out the skinning. Not all of the objects do it, the eyes and teeth and spine on the top of the head are fine but I guess that could be because it's 100% on that joint? I've tried painting weights and smoothing the weights but for some reason it's not letting me paint on the spines or the glowing circles despite the fact I combined the mesh. I know I'm probably doing something silly wrong but it's really confusing me.

Fantastic Voyage: Rigs and Deformers

I finally finished building the rigs for my bacteria and Leviathan. The bacteria went alright once I made one because I could just move a few of the joints around. For some reason I really struggled with the Leviathan one, I couldn't get the main control to work properly but I finally got it there (I think at least). They aren't actually attached to my models yet because I want to make my textures and bump maps first...which will hopefully be done by tomorrow if everything goes right.

Maya Skinning Method 2: Post Weights & Interactive Bind

Maya Skinning Method I: Interactive Weighting, Component Editor, & Paint Weights