[ART] Bend Polygons With Joints

[JonnyAnomaly]

Once you've laid out the joints, you have to skin bind them, which is binding the joints to the mesh. When in "animation" mode, select all of your joints and finally select the mesh. Then click Skin -> Bind Skin -> Smooth Bind, but make sure to go into the options with Smooth Bind. Make sure "Normalize weights" is set to interactive, and that your "max influences" doesn't go above 4, so a setting of 3 should be fine. Once you've clicked Bind Skin, moving your joints should move your mesh along with it. From this point, you'll want to paint the skin weights to make sure that the joints are deforming the mesh nicely. There are some good tutorials on youtube if you just search "maya weight painting".

Hope that helps, I've only done this a couple of times myself, so maybe someone else here can help further!