What are some of the latest trends and developments in skinning and animation in Blender?

1 What is skinning?

Skinning is the process of attaching a mesh, or a surface, to a skeleton, or a set of bones, that controls its movement and deformation. Skinning allows you to animate your character by posing and rotating the bones, and the mesh will follow along. Skinning also involves defining how much each bone influences each vertex, or point, of the mesh. This is called weight painting, and it determines how smoothly and realistically the mesh bends and stretches.

3 How to use the cloth brush?

The cloth brush is a new feature in Blender 2.91 that allows you to simulate cloth behavior on your mesh. You can use it to create wrinkles, folds, and creases on your character's clothing, skin, or hair. To use the cloth brush, you need to enable the cloth simulation on your mesh by adding a cloth modifier. Then, you can switch to the sculpt mode and select the cloth brush from the toolbar. You can adjust the settings of the brush, such as the pressure, the stiffness, and the damping, to achieve different effects. You can also use different deform modes, such as grab, pinch, or inflate, to manipulate the cloth.

4 How to use the corrective smooth modifier?

The corrective smooth modifier is a useful tool to smooth out the distortions and artifacts that may occur on your mesh when you deform it with bones. It works by comparing the original shape of your mesh with the deformed shape, and applying a smoothing algorithm to reduce the difference. To use the corrective smooth modifier, you need to add it to your mesh after the armature modifier. Then, you can tweak the settings of the modifier, such as the factor, the iterations, and the scale, to control how much smoothing is applied. You can also use vertex groups to limit the effect of the modifier to certain areas of your mesh.