ngSkinTools 2
Description
Layers
Skinning layers are a central feature of ngSkinTools. With them, you break your rig down into easier manageable parts and edit them separately, then blend everything together through layer transparency.
They’re not just a simple way to make your work more organized - they also physically isolate groups of influences from the rest of the rig, so paint and edit operations won’t mix-in influences you were not expecting. This also allows you to do things that were impossible before: per-layer mirroring, adjusting influence weight up/down through layer transparency, blend transferred weights with previous weights, to name a few.
Viewport tools
Just like in the previous version, ngSkinTools brings its own weight painting tools. Improving viewport experience is the main focus of V2, and it's complete revamp over the previous implementation.
- Selecting influences on screen, a #1 requested feature from users, is nowhere. Just hold “S” and drag over the surface to select dominant influence from that part of the mesh, or hover over a joint pivot to select precisely the joints you want;
- In addition to the usual surface projection mode for the brush, the new “screen” brush projection mode is useful when you want to quickly set weights for both sides of the mesh;
- Custom shortcuts while in paint mode allow for quick access to intensity presets;
- Color feedback is now provided through VP2 APIs, greatly improving the performance of displayed meshes.
Smoothing
Keeping weights in harmony with each other is not easy. ngSkinTools help you smooth weights with the control you need, allowing you to control the intensity, number of iterations and effective radius. For very dense meshes, added “iterations” argument now allows for the quicker spread of smoothness over larger areas of the mesh.
The “relax” tool from V1 is gone. With major performance rework, you’ll notice that simple flood-smoothing is now much faster and should be a near-instant operation even with large meshes.
The opposite “brother” of smooth brush, “sharpen”, is also there - for cases where you want to just bring out the dominant influences
Mirroring
Mirroring is one of the most frequent automated tasks you might want from your skinning tool. With ngSkinTools, you’ll be able to:
- Mirror rigs in any pose; no need to switch to T-pose;
- Have granular control over left/right/center influences mapping, matching left/right joints by naming convention, joint labels, etc;
- Easily mirror parts of your rig by leveraging layers;
- Automatic mirroring of weights to the opposite side as you paint so that you don’t need to get distracted from painting while working on symmetrical layers.
Layer effects
With the “mirror as a layer effect” feature, ngSkinTools introduce a new concept to ngSkinTools - layer effects. This differs from automatic mirroring of weights as it’s not directly modifying your layer weights; instead, it’s a post-effect that happens in the background buffer. This has multiple benefits, like a much cleaner seamline of left/right sides, the ability to tweak mirroring settings AFTER weights are painted, etc.
Compatibility
As its predecessor, ngSkinTools2 operates on standard Maya skinCluster (also known as “smooth skin”), so no custom nodes will be required to use your rig. The plugin has a couple of custom nodes, but they’re only required while you work on setting up your skin weights and can be deleted after, so your work should stay compatible with most pipelines out there.
Performance
A lot of speed improvements have been made since V2, like improving the utilization of modern multi-core processors, or eliminating bottlenecks through much heavier use of performance profiling. Having a responsive, snappy tool is always a pleasure to work with.
When I end up switching to Maya as main go to rigging tool I tried to search for tools and plugins to ease up my work. Ngskintools came up al lot as "must have" for any skining workload. At first glance everything seams to work smoothly and mirroring works very good (if you remember to check iif setup is correct) UI/UX needs to get used too. Problems come up at the end wen you try to validate your skinning. Theres starts to aprear 'ghost' weights on random vertices that tool dosent show on any layer weight paiting. You try switching layers on/off to narrow down the problem but on every layer problem persist. If you try to fix it on one layer it keeps escalating to other. In short maner you have verices flying randomly in space with influece of random bones. You try to go for importing back up preset in tool to see if you can minimise the problem too see it only chaged ther result but problem persist. You try to merge layers that seem to be fine not to lose all your work to see that merging chages you final result.
To summary after it happended third time that my 1,5 day of work for client went to bin I came here to lay this frustrated review becouse it already cost me more than 65$ I pay initialy.
To not end only on negatives I delivered models skinned using this tools to clients without problems too. And when it worked it was usefull. But I won't consider it "miracle"/or "must have" tool as some reviews I've read.
Hey, not sure if you're still having this issue, but it occurred to me too. The issue I found was actually that sometimes your weights on a single vertex did not completely add up to 1, and as such fell back to the last layer that was completely flooded. As such, this created situations where moving the hand would leave the knuckles behind in space, etc. This can be solved by making sure each layer's weights flood wherever the next layer is going to paint, to ensure that if the proceeding layers don't add up to one, they have another flood to fall back to. For example, to ensure the hand does have this issue, make sure you flood the entire hand from the wrist joint before painting wrist weights, then flood from the knuckle down when doing your index finger, etc etc. Sort of in the same way you flood before painting in Maya, only in this scenario the weights you flood stay the same afterward.
I give this five stars and here's why. Firstly it's really fast and efficient then. Let's say this, if you have previously only used a standard set of skinning tools, so this will greatly change your work. I definitely recommend using it! I really like how this script handles mesh smoothing, it's really a big difference between standard antialiasing. It is worth noting that I am working in Maya version 2020. I create a rig for the animals and then animate them. I recently made a rig for very thin fins that have several bone joints inside. The back side did not intersect the front side. So "ngSkinTools2" did an excellent job of smoothing such surfaces. I would never have achieved this result using the standard skinning method. So I myself use the result of my work and understand how important the skinning process is. Yeah-yeah, Layers matter! The ability to create layers provides incredible control over the placement of weights that is unmatched by standard Mayan tools. I now have the ability to create really soft fillets over a long length of mesh with minimal bones. I also want to note the amazing job of mirroring the weight when working with a brush. And of course, save and load all the work done, all previously created layers and weight distribution. I was a little worried about entering the license key, but everything turned out to be simpler, I quickly entered the registration key and everything works great. Thank you Viktoras Makauskas for this awesome "ngSkinTools 2"! Good luck to everyone in rigging! ;)
I like this tool)
Licence binds to your computer so if you buy a new machine, register on the wrong computer or have multiple machines you will have to buy another licence, no response from support after trying for well over a month to help out with this.
Support is terrible. Purchased but have not received the license.
I downloaded it but it ask me an ID number and I haven't received it neither the invoice of my purchase.
ngSkinTools 2 is a massive update to the essential plugin for layered weight painting in Maya! Fast and robust, once you try it you will wonder how you got along painting weights any other way.