[kennez]

I am following the rigging tutorial in Timothy Albee's book Lightwave 7 Character Animation, and I have come up with a couple of questions.

1) When creating weight maps, how do you decide what values to put on each part? For example, on page 126, there is a picture of the characters foot, with 4 values. How did each of those values come to be? Is it guesswork, or is there some way to get these figures?

2) Is there an alternative to weightmaps, and if so, could somebody please explain it to me? I vaguely recall Larry Schulz (Splinegod) mentioning that he rarely uses weightmaps. Is it easier to rig without using them?

If the answer to either of these questions is in the rigging tutorial here, just let me know. I haven't got round to watching it yet.