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Descripción

Effective May 15, 2025

The technology and IP behind ngSkinTools have been acquired by Autodesk®, with integration planning underway for the future. In the meantime, the ngSkinTools plug-in for Autodesk® Maya® is now available for free download and the ngSkinTools team is here to support customers, just as always. Please contact ngSkinTools directly at https://www.ngskintools.com/contact/ for license sales and support questions. Learn more here: https://www.ngskintools.com/about/.

 

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 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 with 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 a 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, the 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 introduces 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.

Acerca de esta versión

Versión 2.4.0, 20/05/2025
2.4.0 (2025-May-16) Removing license key management features, as ngSkinTools is now free for commercial use as well. 2.3.0 (2025-Apr-05) Added: Maya 2026 release. 2.2.5 (2025-Mar-23) Fixed: in some cases, smoothing was not working when there were locked influences in the layer. Fixed: delay in UI when switching between meshes 2.2.4 (2025-Feb-16) Added: zooming into current paint target while painting (viewport shortcut F) now zooms into selected influence as well. Works with multi-influence selections as well. 2.2.3 (2025-Feb-15) Fixed: when changing intensity in the viewport, in some cases intensity value is drawn with artifacts. This seems to be a Maya bug - attempting a workaround. 2.2.2 (2025-Feb-13) Fixed: UI got broken with 2.2.1, making it impossible to change brush intensity via slider. Added: MMB brush size/intensity controls now support modified keys. Holding CTRL reduces mouse sensitivity, allowing for fine changes in brush intensity; holding Shift key picks intensity from predefined presets. 2.2.1 (2025-Feb-11) Added: MMB controls for brush size/intensity, similar to Maya’s sculpting tools. Middle-mouse button drag left-right controls brush size, and up-down controls brush intensity. 2.2.0 (2025-Feb-03) Fixed: exporting/importing layers for a transformed rigs (e.g. mesh+joints enclosed in a rotated group). All relationships will now be resolved in world-space. Note: there still might be issues with older export files, as they will contain pre-transformed data. Added: option to sort influences alphabetically in influences view. 2.1.6 (2024-Apr-10) Fixed: rebuilding binaries due to false-positive virus warnings 2.1.5 (2024-Apr-08) Added: Maya 2025 release 2.1.4 (2024-Mar-09) Added: “lock influences” button now toggles all selected influences. Added: color ramp display mode for mask; Fixed: growing/shrinking component selection does not update while painting; Fixed: layer effect direction resets after file reload; Fixed: improved memory management for layer hierarchy deletion & undo iteraction. 2.1.3 (2023-Dec-01) Fixed: vertex selection support while painting got broken in 2.1.2. 2.1.2 (2023-Nov-30) Fixed: Added additional checks to prevent invalid weights appearing in layers after smoothing. Some hard-to-reproduce bugs are being reported, so while the cause is unclear, blindly trying some major suspects. Fixed: Slight improvements to color display visibility when painting. Fixed: With multiple layers selected, toggling layers enabled/disabled status should no longer reset layer selection. 2.1.1 (2023-Nov-27) Added: Even if the “Prune Small Weights Before Writing to Skin Cluster” feature is not used, extremely small weights (below 0.000000001) will still be converted to 0 to avoid precision problems with the skinCluster node, which is particularly sensitive to the weight sum not being exactly 1.0. Added: Increase precision for the slider “Prune small weights before writing to skin cluster”. Fixed: Addressed another cause of skinCluster warnings “Warning: Some weights could not be set to the specified value”. Fixed: “Cycle display mode” viewport shortcut should be functional again.

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  • Was hyped from net reviews, but end up frustrated.
    Aleksander Szymkuć | junio 13, 2024

    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.  

    Nicolas Hoyos-romero | octubre 20, 2024

    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.


  • Now only ngSkinTools2
    Mikael Nesterov | septiembre 13, 2023 Descarga verificada (¿Qué es esto?)

    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! ;)


  • incredibly
    Alex Vovk | mayo 01, 2023 Descarga verificada (¿Qué es esto?)

    I like this tool)


  • good tools, awful licence setup and support
    Mark Nicholas | marzo 25, 2022

    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.

    Jonathan Shelley | agosto 16, 2023

    Support is terrible. Purchased but have not received the license.


  • I can't use it
    Benjamin Trejo | agosto 06, 2021 Descarga verificada (¿Qué es esto?)

    I downloaded it but it ask me an ID number and I haven't received it neither the invoice of my purchase. 

     


  • A must-have for Maya rigging
    Aerys Bat | junio 29, 2021 Descarga verificada (¿Qué es esto?)

    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.

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