ngSkinTools2: skinning character body

[@lgtwzrd]

Just the smoothing brush adjustments inbetween poses, and the mirroring of weights have saved me an infinite amount of hours. I used to think that painting skin weights is hard, but it really needed a mature tool like ngskintools to come along and make a difference. Thank you!

[@ryomaeda8]

I was about to give up on skinning in Maya, but your tools and this tutorial saved the day. Thank you.

[@dondrapichrust]

skinning was always nightmare for me, couldnt get smoothness right, huge Thank you for tool and the walktrough ! cheers

[@abidi910]

you are the person makes skinning super enjoyable. I am looking forward to skin my characters thanks to you. Thank you for all of these amazing tools.

[@LordLuigi_Rigs]

Lets all feast on this! 😃

[@jamesbrady1930]

this tool is deceptively complex, but once you get around learning curve it is incredibly useful. and damn responsive too. lol smoothing portion is insanely fast and "smooth" lol. I will definitely be buying this for my cartoon youtube channel I started. i got a lot of work to complete but this will be great. Using this along with rapid rig modular. :) for now I am grateful I can use the free version. truly exceptional software you making this stage so much easier and more enjoyable. love the layering too. thank you.

[@minilabyrinth]

I could not stop saying "THIS IS SO EASY" as I was following along!

[@hamidthephysicist6376]

Jean Claude Van Damme. You killed me man ! Thank you for the tool and the tutorial

[@herculesmare4209]

Great video. Nice to see a workflow tut. Thank you so much

[@gherat]

I was wondering, when you use s to easily select joints, my camera rotation or focus point is always out of place. Is there a setting where the camera rotates automatically around the selected joint?

[@gherat]

Ow, just press F, it's in one of the instruction videos, however it isn't working. It does jump to the area you're trying to paint but it doesn't orbit around the the joint for some reason..

[@PlanetPostmoderna]

Great video! Do you have any instructions on using the tool on character meshes that include multiple parts?

[@HistoryVideoGamesMiscStuff]

Is there a way to export just the masks? I find that sometimes I need to delete ngskintools, but it would be great to be able to capture just the layer masks.

[@shadowmurlock282]

how did you add the shoulder joint after masking the shoulders?

[@Felix-os5hf]

Some feedback on the current version (2.0.43) It's quite hard to see the wireframe through the white when painting with 'all influences, multiple colors', if the wireframe was black or another color here it would be much easier to see.

[@onhi910]

Hi, can i asking u about how to select joint quick like in video? I dont know how to open that kind of UI

[@Fateofaddiction]

Hi, this is great video to help me start. Just 1 question: My character has a big shoulder pad and I hid the face so I can see underneath and skin the area properly. But when I go back in paint mode, the faces that I hid are visible again. As soon as I leave paint mode, they disappear again. I'm just wondering if there are options in the tool to help me (or maybe a feature for the next update ;)). Anyway, thanks again for the awesome work!

[@krishowes2330]

Thanks. Such a great plugin. Will be using this a lot. What's the difference between Surface and Volume Brush Projection?

[@ngskintools]

Thanks! Have a look at kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y2HWkpZmptx4Z7s, the last chapter "volume smoothing" explains it in more detail.

[@krishowes2330]

@@ngskintools Thanks that helped. Im having another major issue... Ive used Advanced Skeleton to rig a character. As soon as I 'Assign from closest point' the mesh disappears in Arnold renderview. Its there in the viewport. Do you know if ngskintools is not compatible with Adv Skeleton? Cheers

[@krishowes2330]

Sorted issue. I had to create a new rig using AdvSkel again. Then imported the layers from Json onto the new mesh worked a treat.

[@ashwininamdar]

Thank you very much for this video! I find it fascinating that once I finish painting using ngSkinTools, I don't have to 'flatten' the weights into the skinCluster node. Will machines that do not have the plugin installed be able to read the rig just as fine?

[@ngskintools]

Yes, the flattening is happening in real-time. The rigs are immediately usable on machines without the plugin; however, for best compatibility, you should delete ngSkinTools nodes when exporting your rig. See FAQ section on the website to learn how to do this via UI or code.

[@ashwininamdar]

@@ngskintools Thank you!

[@scoutrenegade6761]

Thanks. Always errors though when using the mirror tool. It's like it inverts the painted area to random bones on either side. Just using one layer and 4 spline bones. X axis... only thing I can think of is my UVs are laid out with substance so not a standard front projection or anything like that.

[@ngskintools]

Always check influences mapping. I explain this in a kzbin.info/www/bejne/f2esaYCMn8-NrdU in more details (see "influences mapping" chapter)

[@lenneth1188]

does brsmoothweight replace this tool?

[@MetalGearMk3]

Can you guys port ngSkinTools to Blender?

[@ultraboy99x]

Have you ever considered developing skinning tools for Blender? It's such a neglected area of that package.

[@ngskintools]

Well.. yes and no. I have looked at it countless times, but each time I change my mind when I see how poorly supported the API is and how many complaints there are from other devs.

[@manvredo]

Hi, thanks for the tutorial ;) The only thing I can not see in the video is, how you get from the mask to the bones ... you copy and paste weights from clipboard?

[@ngskintools]

hm.. which particular part? afaik I don't do any conversion, just switch to mask in influences screen and paint it separately. I also prefer to have influences weights to 1.0 across whole layer.

[@Smile-gq8nj]

When I do like him my body isn't staying still, it's moving the whole body, anyone knows how to fix this please ?

[@ngskintools]

Hi, can you elaborate? There can be a lot of reasons why skin is not moving as it should:) If you're using layers and flooding the whole layer to, say, leg joint, then don't forget to paint mask as well, otherwise leg joint will influence the whole mesh.

[@lenneth1188]

what's the hotkey to show joints?

[@manvredo]

S

[@ngskintools]

you can also click "H" for help and there's a small on-screen help display in viewport with most hotkeys.

[@Poklonov]

Я вот одного не пойму, почему на видео все работает, а когда пытаешься поработать на второй версии, скины ломаются. Я до сих пор пользуюсь версией 1.8, а с двойкой так и не подружился. Как по мне так версия 1.8 самая лучшая. Если бы только бы окно для мапинга костей ей сделать растягивающимся цены бы ей не было. И баг починить, когда майка вылетает, если красить веса в режиме компонентов.

[@ypypjay]

Thank you for providing the wonderful tool, actually I think it's the de facto skinning tool in maya animation industry. Good joke, by the way😂. Hope to see more useful function in ngskin. Also I think it will be more wonderful if the brush mode can interactively change to 'smooth' when pressing shift, and switch back to current when shift is released. So that users won't need to manually click 'smooth' to switch brush mode, in order to change the 'brush projection' or other settings in smooth mode.

[@ngskintools]

Hi, "shift" actually should switch to smooth in replace/add/scale brush modes. Are ngSkinTools hotkeys working for you? E.g. "h" for help or "s" for selecting current influence? Write me to support email (use contact form on the website), we'll have a look.

[@ypypjay]

@@ngskintools Hi, Viktoras Makauskas. Thanks for your reply. I wrote an email demonstrating what I mean, and sent it to ngskintools email address 2 weeks ago.Hope the mail will make it more clear to you.

[@SuperMontana2008]

great tool, but whenever i switched to Volume smoothing it takes forever, maya hangs in shame

[@flufflepimp]

Awesome video! That joke Hahah Terrible... but so terrible I'm laughing XD

[@chaohuluo4596]

magic tool thanks

[@AshT8524]

Damn, that was a goid joke 😆

[@Romaelzo]

I enjoyed this Very Much! until u said that joke :D