Hey sorry for the newbness of the question but: I was trained on max, and max has one skinning method to rule them. Have to use Maya on this project. I'm confused when I see Maya smooth and rigid bind. The docs say smooth is for CG and rigid is for games, but, really? Can they be THAT different that a game engine simply…
Games do support multiple skin weights (smooth skin). I have no idea of how many for different engines. I know that UT2k4 allowed up to 3 weights per vertex :P
Most games do both, nearly every character you see in a game is what Maya would call smooth binding. Rigid binding is more like parenting to a node or bone; the entire affected shape would move/rotate with a bone. That said, I haven't messed around with rigid binding much.