Well, what’s skinning? I know it’s some kind of tool people seem to want in Blender, but what does it do?
I think Blender allready has skinning capabilities, since version 1.58 and it seems very cool and usefull.
Take a look at these:
http://helium.homeip.net/xoom/tutorials/Cave/Cave.html
http://www.ingiebee.com/tutorials/Blender%20tutorial%20Fun%20with%20nurbs.htm
http://www.linuxgraphic.org/section3d/blender/pages/didacticiels/pulveri1/pulveri1ang.pdf
I really hope that this is what you’ve been looking for… 
bye…
didnt sub surfs eliminate the need for skinning?
I don’t think that we should see sub surfs as a substitute of skinning…
One can do miracles with both tools…
skontar.
Um… are we talking about skinning as some type of modeling tool I haven’t heard of, or skinning as in making the UI skinnable?
A skinnable GUI is essentially one which allows you to seriously alter/customize the GUI layout and “look and feel”. Some examples would be Windows Media Player (starting at v8.0, I think), WindowsXP to some degree (It’s built in, but we don’t really get access to it), Windows9x on with the use of tools such as WindowBlinds from Stardock, Winamp, and I suppose almost all of the Linux GUIs (such as KDE and Gnome… I’m sure there are others out there, but I don’t know of them).
Imp
Well, what’s skinning? I know it’s some kind of tool people seem to want in Blender, but what does it do?
It depends on who you ask. This is a perfect example of one of the marketing practices I hate: making up terminology. You’d think that they could just stick with the accepted termonology already in place, but noooo… they have to go off and make up terms like “hyper-voxels”, “meta-NURBs”, and “skinning”. Those are only three examples (two of which are from Lightwave, and one of which is the term currently being discussed).
Anyway, as far as modeling goes, skinning reffers to interpolating a surface across cross-sectional curves. As far as character set-up goes, it reffers to defining how an IKA chain effects a surface (or its “skin”). As far as GUI’s go, it reffers to customizing the apearance of the GUI.
So, in short, it’s a term coined by several people for completely different things. I think that it would be best to stick to the accepted terms. 
it’s half there already. people just want better skinning tools. i agree. the skinning capabilites in blender right now suck. they are just not even close to rhino’s capabilities.
rhino is a tool all about nurbs, you would expect it to have better skinning options.
I agree only to that there’s always room for improvement. But Blender’s skinning capabilities work pretty much o.k.
skontar.