Rigging First Attempt

I have always wanted to be able to rig but have put it off because it seemed too difficult, but at this stage of university I should be trying to challenge myself and learning new things that will be useful in future. Rigging will be especially useful for creating realistic levels.

I followed a tutorial in 3D world magazine #172 in which it goes through the process of rigging a character for posing in maya, to begin I exported a human mesh from mudbox as an fbx and brought it into maya, I then created the skeleton with the root joint just below the stomach and the joints going to the head, feet and wrist, I didn't bother rigging the hands just yet so that I can understand the basics before overcomplicating things. below is a screenshot of the skeleton after I corrected the joint axis.

I then bound the skeleton to the rig and began to fix the skin weightings using the paint skin weight tool, to do this I went through the joints an made sure that only the polygons I wanted to be affected were white and painted in the black (0 value) for the parts that should not be affected.

Unfortunately at this point the rig seemed to ignore the new skin weightings, my guess is that it may be to do with the mesh I was using, so I decided that I would rig an inorganic model of my own making to try and get the hang of making controllers and constraints.