ngSkinTools
描述
Character skinning made easy
ngSkinTools is a skinning plugin for Autodesk® Maya®, introducing new concepts to character skinning such as layers, any-pose-mirroring, enhanced paint brushes, true smoothing, and more.
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 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.
Mirroring
You won’t need to go to T-pose again when going through paint+mirror cycle, you can mirror in any pose now. There’s also a much greater control over what influences mirror onto which one: associating left-right influences by name without prefix, manual association overrides, etc. Mirroring is also layer-friendly, so you can mirror just the parts of your model you’re currently working on - very helpful, when you want to keep other parts of your rig intact.
Painting
ngSkinTools has its own set of paint tools, which are capable of working on a per-layer basis. Each tool maintains its own intensity, which is handy when toggling between smooth and replace through shift-modifier. Smooth is completely redesigned and you’re going to just love it.
Smoothing
The new smooth brush gives much better results, as it operates on all influences of a vertex at once. For even greater control, the more precise “relax weights” tool is there, which also can smooth across mesh boundaries and thin meshes.
Compatibility
ngSkinTools operate on standard Maya skinCluster (also known as “smooth skin”), so no custom nodes will be required to use your rig. Plugin has a couple of custom nodes, but they’re only required until the rig is complete, and can be deleted after, so your work should stay compatible with most pipelines out there.
Performance
All of the computing-intensive operations are being handled by a C++ plugin, and are being constantly tested on high-resolution meshes.
Great plugin but it should allow access to older versions in case of stability issues.
i like it
It's a very good tool, more efficient than default Maya skinning tools , & it's very compatible with Maya skin cluster, it doesn't have the ugly defects of maya's default skinning issues like: messing up the weights if you don't lock each bone/joint you finish...etc.. It has some very excellent features that are not mentioned in the description (like smooth painting across different geometry shells, it gives better results than Maya's defaults)
Only downside: I wish if it can highlight the joint we choose in the viewport -not just in the tool window- makes it easier to avoid confusion.
It's available free for non-commercial usage, & pricing for individual artist & another pricing if for a whole Studio.. latest version can be downloaded from it's main site.. At the end,, this is an excellent tool that will increase your work's quality, shorten your production time, make skinning a joy instead of long pain, worth each penny .
Amazing work!
Any chance for Maya 2018 support sometime soon?
My only regret is that I didn't find this plug years ago.
thanks a lot
ngskin has cut our time we spent on weights in half, and we're getting more precise control with layers. This swiss pocket knife for handling weights has saved us from a number of potential headaches.