What's New in Skinning

Skinning

You can now weight a mesh by using Heat Map skinning and/or by Voxel skinning.

Both skinning methods will give better starting weights than traditional envelope weighting. Both Heat Map skinning and Voxel skinning can solve outside the skin pose and both can use the vertex selection to solve just a subset of the mesh.

Note:

Using the Voxel or Heat Map skinning solvers result in baked weights. The weights are still editable with vertex or paint weighting, but not with envelopes.

You can find the Voxel and Heat Map skinning solvers in the Weight Properties group.

Note: Depending on the topology, you can use Heat Map skinning for broader body skinning, then Voxel skinning to isolate and tweak specific areas of the mesh.

Heat Map Skinning

You can now use a heat diffusion technique to distribute influence weights. Initial weights are set on each influence object inside the mesh acting as a heat source, emitting weight values onto the surrounding mesh.

Higher (hotter) weight values occur closest to the joint and dissipate to lower (cooler) values as you move away from the object.

Note: Heat Map skinning can fail on non-manifold or meshes with holes or meshes with thin triangle meshes. It works better on water-tight models that are fairly uniform. Heat Map skinning can solve faster than Voxel skinning.

Voxel Skinning

Voxel skinning is a new smooth skinning method that allows you to isolate specific areas of the mesh and produce quick, high-quality results. Unlike standard skinning, which has no concept of body parts, Voxel skinning uses a voxel representation of the mesh to help calculate influence weights. It computes, then applies, the resulting weights to the existing closed-form skinning method, deforming the character's geometry where you need it and can solve the skin weights even when you are out of bind pose.

You can adjust the falloff amount and other parameters for tweaking particular areas. You can also solve for out-of-bind pose because the skin modifier stores that information internally. This allows you to get more feedback on the affect of the changes.

Note: Voxel skinning does not have the issues that Heat Map skinning has with non-manifold, or meshes with holes, or meshes with thin triangles. It will solve, but might calculate more slowly than Heat Map skinning. For best results the bones should be inside the mesh volume.