Skinning the Rig

For my Team Production (Gambit), we are making a third person platform game.  To make a game you must go through a long process creating different assets of the game, from environment components like trees and rocks, to fully animated characters.  However you can not simply start with a fully animated character most times, a lot of times you have to take the time to create said character and rig them for animation.  For those that don't know, a rig is essentially the bone structure of your game characters.  You must create the rig with joints in the right places where you want the character to bend certain parts of their body to best imitate walking, running, shooting, swinging and so on. However creating the rig for your character is only half the battle, you must also apply skin weights to the rig after you have all the bones and joints set up the way you feel they should be laid out.  What applying skin weights does is makes it so that each joint only affects a certain section and amount of the body of the character.  This will affect not only which sections of the body each joint effects, but how strong of an effect that joint has on that particular section of the body.  That is what I am currently doing, I am editing where on the characters body each joint can alter, and how much they can alter said part of the body.