Here you’ll find a summary of most important information regarding launch of next major ngSkinTools version.
ngSkinTools has been around for quite a while. Released to public in 2012 (see twitter), it has become a widely used tool among Maya riggers. I’m so grateful for all your feedback, feature suggestions and bug reports I’ve received. It’s not easy to keep a software project alive and relevant for so many years - or stay focused on single side-project for so long. Thank you for keeping the spark alive!
For a while I’ve been wanting to introduce many major changes to ngSkinTools. Current version has reached it’s limits where introducing further improvements is impossible without throwing old things away and rewriting some things from scratch. The time came to reset, keep the essentials and say “how would it look if you designed it from scratch again?”
Most of the changes at the time of writing are mostly internal - changing UI code, moving and rewritting huge blocks of c++ code - but now we’re getting close to rival V1 in terms of feature-completeness.
For detailed summary, see “What’s new” section in documentation. Here are the highlights of things changed/soon to come:
For now - quite some things are still missing that are in V1.
Check Roadmap for more details on the implementation progress.
Maya 2018 and upwards; initially testing will happen on Windows and Linux; macOS will have to wait until later.
The reason for cutting 2017 and below is because compatible compilers for older versions of Maya do not fully support C++11. Also, I’d prefer to not have to support more than 3 versions of Maya (2018, 2019, 2020) at the time of launch.
Feature completeness/stability aside, …
To start things off, the setup will be similar to v1:
Download latest: 2.0.22 View all 2.0 releases
The most important thing right now is your input. Your feedback will shape the future of ngSkinTools. Let me know how our testing is going.
Some tips of things to try until I cook an overview video:
S
(“sample”) will select the dominant influence under the mouse; it’s based on weights, not joint position. Just hold S
and drag brush over your mesh, you’ll get it.B
and dragging will help set new brush radiusShift
as usual switches to SmoothI
will open in-viewport intensity selectorMy contact info, as usual, is here.