Binding the rig to the alien model

In order to bind the rig to the alien, so that the rig could now control the physical model, I applied a 'smooth bind', as this had an option of "painting the weights", so that I could control how much influence each joint had on the geometry of the model.  Here is a video of the process of binding the skin and then testing out the rig, to make sure that the initial bind has worked.

As you will see in this video, most of the rig is working fine; however, you will notice that there are severe problems with the left shoulder; if I move any of the upper body controls, this shoulder would twist around and disrupt a lof of the geometry around that area.  In order to stop this, I decided to open the Paint Weights tool (a tool that I will be using a lot more later on), and select the left shoulder joint.

As you see from this picture, this joint holds a huge amount of influence over the arm.  In order to take away this influence, I simply set the value of the brush to 0 and then flooded that area.  This meant that all of the influence that this joint had was flooded out.  This seemed to resolve this particular problem, but I would need to go back to this joint and paint the weights from scratch, as I am about to do with every other joint in this rig.