Character and Narrative: binding

So I have finally gotten closer to binding. First of all I had to orient the controllers to the joints. Since you cannot juts orient it to the joint because it has trach values and if you try it just messes everything up,the way we did it was creating a null group, orienting it to the joint, then parenting it to the control and freezing the transformations on the control NOT the null group!!! And then orienting the control to the joint. Then it was the matter of setting up the hiearchy of the controls.

(setting up the hierchy of controllers)

When orienting the controls to the joints a few times I had a problem of joints flying off or messing up, but while making my bully character I have learned how to fix it, it was just a matter of taking the control out of the hierchy, orienting the null group again, parenting everything back and make sure to freeze trasformations again. By trial and error with the bully character I have learned that the trash values on the controller can mess everything up. However when I saved the whole thing and opned it up again, the legs were messed up for some reason, Matt advised to just redo the joints on the legs because everything else was working fine. Once again I was battleing with the legs of the character. But the second time around they seemed to cooperate and I was able to bind everything with no major issues.
I then moved on to painting the weight on the charcater-

(painting weights tool)

The Paint Skin Weights Tool is one of the Artisan-based tools in Maya. With the Paint Skin Weights Tool, you can paint weight intensity values on the current smooth skin. When you select an influence to paint, the mesh displays color feedback (by default) in white and black. You can verify that Color Feedback is turned on under the Display heading. Turning on Color Feedback helps you identify the weights on the surface by representing them as grayscale values (smaller values are darker, larger values are lighter). You can also turn on Use color ramp under the Gradient heading to view weights in color. 

So when I was finished with the painting weights it was finally tome to finish everything off.