With Physique you can go down to the Edit Poly level and select which verts you want to work with and hide ones you don't want to touch. Is there a way to do this with the Skin modifier?
if your working with absolute weighting then just stick and editable poly mod under the skin and move the offending geometry out of the way. Relaxing can be pretty handy here too. when your done delete the modifier. before the new vert selection tools this was a really neat trick for weighting entire elements to a bones.…
you can hide the geometry element from the poly object itself !?! i used to make sub-obj selections after i had reached rigging so that i could quickly hide unhide entire groups fast. also on the skin modifier itself there is an option to display or not all vertices. if you choose not to show then it will only show the…