ngSkinTools

Releases

ngSkinTools 1.8.3

  • Sun, Feb 14, 2021

A small maintenance release for v1.

  • Dropping support for Maya prior 2016 and below; users for older Maya’s will need to rely on 1.8.2 and any future maintenance will happen on 2017+;
  • Fixed: activation dialog not opening in Maya 2020;
  • Added signed binaries for macOS.

Compatibility: Maya 2017 Maya 2018 Maya 2019 Maya 2020

ngSkinTools 1.8.2

  • Fri, Jan 31, 2020

Fixing couple of nasty bugs.

  • Fixed: Render.exe crashes with ngSkinTools installed. Seems like a bug in Maya Autoloader, related to MAYA_SHELF_PATH; this is fixed by reworking how ngSkinTools installs it’s shelf; as a side effect, users may see duplicate buttons in ngSkinTools shelf - just delete one manually.
  • Fixed: online activation on Linux sometimes fails because ngSkinTools can’t detect host id.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018 Maya 2019 Maya 2020

ngSkinTools 1.8.1

  • Wed, Jan 15, 2020

Just a rebuild for Maya 2020, Windows and Linux; no macOS build yet - need to figure out the whole notarization thing first.

For all others patiently waiting for any news in the horizon when it comes to new ngSkinTools features - don’t worry, the project is not dead, I just might have dived into too much refactoring and there will be a more of a big-bang-ish release soon to come.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018 Maya 2019 Maya 2020

ngSkinTools 1.7.9

  • Fri, Jun 7, 2019
  • Fixed: Maya 2019 on Linux loading issues.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018 Maya 2019

ngSkinTools 1.7.8

  • Sun, Jan 27, 2019

Mainly a 2019 support rebuild, fixing a few bugs as I’m rechecking things on new Maya release.

  • Added: Maya 2019 support
  • Fixed: various standalone license activation issues on Macos and Linux
  • Fixed: various shelf bugs. ngSkinTools will now create it’s own shelf instead of adding a button to “Custom” shelf.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018 Maya 2019

ngSkinTools 1.7.6

  • Wed, Jun 20, 2018
  • Fixed: UI under some conditions could open in broken state when closing/reopening ngSkinTools window.
  • Fixed: skinCluster would sometimes start producing warnings “The weight total would have exceeded 1.0”.
  • Fixed: macOS autoloader now properly recognize the plugin

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018

ngSkinTools 1.7.5

  • Thu, Mar 29, 2018
  • Fixing previous release build issues.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018

ngSkinTools 1.7.4

  • Thu, Mar 22, 2018
  • License activation related bugfixes

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018

ngSkinTools 1.7.3

  • Thu, Oct 12, 2017
  • Adding OSX builds for Maya 2016 and 2016.5

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018

ngSkinTools 1.7.2

  • Wed, Oct 4, 2017

One more incremental update.

  • Linux/Maya 2016 should properly load now.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018

ngSkinTools 1.7.1

  • Thu, Sep 28, 2017

An emergency fix for Linux, as it looks like that 1.7.0 is not loading there. Thanks for a quick report!

The other change is an attempt to eliminate some strange crashes I’ve not been able to reproduce on my machine.

  • Fixed: plugin should now properly load on Linux.
  • Some changes in parallel evaluation of skin weights calculation in attempt to get rid of some mysterious crashes.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018

ngSkinTools 1.7.0

  • Tue, Sep 26, 2017

Took much longer than expected, but finally releasing update for Maya 2018. There’s been a lot of refactoring in build system (again), so I almost expect that something broke for someone out there. In case you have serious issues (like, plugin not starting at all), reinstall the previous release and let me know - I’ll try to get it fixed asap (as always).

Note: only 2017 and 2018 Maya is supported on OSX with this release. Did not want to delay the release any further - will hopefully push support for older versions with next iteration.

There’s also some small fixes in functionality:

  • Fixed: mesh should redraw properly after mirror undo/redo;
  • Mirroring should now properly respect vertex selection.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017 Maya 2018

ngSkinTools 1.6.1

  • Tue, Mar 28, 2017
  • Fixed: occasional crash when switching tools while painting

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.6

  • Tue, Mar 21, 2017
  • Added: “Distribute removed weight” option in Paint tool. When turned on, all weight that you remove from current influence will be distributed to all other influences in a vertex proportionally. In short, this is about the same behavior as Maya’s standard paint tool, except with one difference: if vertex only had single influence, removing it will not work while this option is turned on.
  • Added: “Stylus Pressure” settings for Paint tool - ngSkinTools will now remember it’s own settings for tablet settings.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.5.4

  • Fri, Mar 10, 2017

A fast hotfix for 1.5.3 release - some dumb changes to logging code made it so that everything works in debug, but nothing in final build!

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.5.3

  • Fri, Mar 10, 2017

Primarily a bug-fix release. Still got a few highly requested features (“distribute removed weight to other influences”, several fixes to mirroring process) - did not want to delay the release further as we had some pretty severe Maya 2017 related issues.

  • Fixed: UI issues in 2017 (errors after startup, stacktrace spam in script output). For few other 2017 UI issues that I could not reproduce - I kindly ask to retest with this new release and let me know if you still have it, like https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/139744241 or https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/139743793;
  • Added: “Edit | Delete Custom Nodes From Selection”;
  • “Reset to default preferences” moved to “Help” menu (to not accidentally interfere with more frequently used edit operations;
  • Fixed: flooding mask with vertex selection not always properly updates skin weights;
  • Fixed: smoothing uninitialized mask leaves it uninitialized (was being filled with zeroes before);
  • Added initial multithreading support. Calculating skin weights, as well as mesh-to-mesh mapping (used in mirror and weight transfer) should be considerably faster.
  • Fixed: influence mapping is not calculated during painting if interactive mirroring is not enabled (also could have written this as “speeds up initialization of paint tool by up to 2 seconds for very large influence counts”)
  • Fixed: slight speed improvements for influence mapping calculation;

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.5.2

  • Thu, Dec 22, 2016
  • Fixed some performance bottlenecks for loading and writing skin weights.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.5.1

  • Thu, Dec 22, 2016

Few maintenance fixes. For all those asking for normalization improvements - first wanted to get these bugs out of my way.

  • Fixed: replace and scale brushes not properly removing weight in some cases;
  • Fixed: starting a paint tool with no active layer does not enter a colored mode for mesh;
  • Fixed: Deselecting a layer while painting leaves mesh black, and does not repaint when selecting a layer again.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.5

  • Sun, Dec 4, 2016
  • Functionality change: mirroring does not have “initialization” concept anymore. There’s no need to go back to T-pose, just adjust your settings directly in mirror tab and mirror.
  • Functionality change: weight transfer is now pose-insensitive. “Closest vertex” transfer mode uses bind pose mesh.
  • Added: “sharpen” brush. This is an “edit all influences at once” brush, and could unofficially be called “remove smooth”. For each vertex, values for it’s dominant influences grow larger, while reducing weight of other influences.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.4.1

  • Sat, Oct 22, 2016

Couple of bugfixes, thanks for reports. Could not get the fix out yesterday because of this global DNS outage.

  • Bugfix: Maya sometimes would think that ngSkinTools layer data node is unnecessary and would automatically delete it. I hope I convinced it to no longer do this.
  • Bugfix: undo should now work properly along with interactive mirror feature.

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.3.0

  • Sun, Oct 16, 2016

Couple of minor fixes, and sneaking in some experiments.

  • Experimental feature: interactive mirror while painting, in any pose. Enable in Paint, Brush Settings (commercial licenses only);
  • Some reorganization in license activation wizard;
  • Fixed: weird python error in license activation wizard;

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017

ngSkinTools 1.2.2

  • Sun, Sep 11, 2016

Some bug hunting done over the weekend.

  • Critical fix: invalid skinCluster weights handling, introduced with 1.2.0 version;
  • OSX: fixed crashes when saving Maya 2017, 2016.5 scenes;
  • If skin was bound with “Colorize skeleton”, mesh will use joint colors in paint mode;

Compatibility: Maya 2014 Maya 2015 Maya 2016 Maya 2016.5 Maya 2017