Binding the mesh to the skeleton and painting skin weights

…With all of our rig controls finished, and our skeletal hierarchy organized, we can…move on to the last steps, which…involve binding the geometry to the skeletal hierarchy.…Before we attach the geometry to the skeleton, we want to make…sure that we've done some house keeping on the geometry, we'll want…to have deleted any history, construction history related to the modeling process,…and this would be done by going to Edit, Delete by Type, History.…Having the construction history deleted will improve…the performance of the rig because Maya will…not have to calculate all those construction…operations every time the character gets moved around.…

It's also a good idea to just freeze transformations on the mesh elements.…This would be done by going to modify,…freeze transformations, and it will zero out the translation…and rotation values, and set the scale to one,…and then, of course, just like with rig elements.…Naming your objects, and, having them consolidated…under one simple mesh group in your hypergraph,…