10 Free Weight Paint addons for Blender!

this is the second video in which we explore add-ons related to weight painting in the first one I showed how to use the easy weight add-on which I totally recommend in this video I'm going to go over a bunch of smaller free add-ons that I found and I hope you find some of them useful and if you know of any other add-ons related to weight painting let me know you can now get access to all CG dive tutorials including my extensive paid courses and released videos and supporter only content for just 5.99 a month check out academy.cgdive.com subscription the first two add-ons that we are going to take a look at come from this repository by Bay rate and Bay is an absolute Legend in CG if you don't know who he is please do a quick Google search so this repository is mainly about his shortcuts but if you scroll down he also has a bunch of add-ons and I'm not interested in custom shortcuts right now so I can just go to the add-ons folder and I found two add-ons related to weight painting mirror all vertex groups and toggle weights so to download them just click on the pi file and then right click on the row button and save this and that will save a pi file and then in blender you can go to edit preferences add-ons click install and find the pi file and install it like an add-on usually add-ons come as zip files but some simpler add-ons are just Pi files so the first add-on that we're going to take a look at is the toggle weights add-on I'll activate it and now if I go to wavebane mode and look at the weights menu there is toggle default weights when you paint weights you can use the airbrush and the subtract brush but you can also just use the mix brush and set the weight to zero if you want to subtract weights and set weight to 1 if you want to add weights and then with strength you can adjust the strength of the brush so for weight you just need a value of zero or one nothing in between and that's exactly what this operator does if I click it weight will be set to 1 and then if I use it again weight will become zero so if I right click on this operator and add a shortcut and set the shortcut to X which I think is a safe shortcut to set then I can just press set here in the viewport and I can toggle weight between 0 and 1. and that is all this add-on does it is very simple but very practical I think among all of the add-ons in this video this one is the one that I'll most likely keep using now let's look at the other add-on mirror mirror all vertex groups if I enable it and go to object data properties and check this menu here you'll find the mirror all vertex groups button so what this does is um if I select the Armature and shift select the mesh go to Weight paint mode and let's say I set my options and I forget to set the Symmetry settings okay I can paint a little bit here on the arm and maybe here and a little bit here okay and then I realized that I don't have symmetry then I can just go to this operator here and check the options it allows you to mirror across all axis unlike blender's default symmetry which only works on X then you have to decide which way so this is positive X and this is negative X you have to know this you know it by looking at this Gizmo here you'll see that X points in this direction so I want to copy from the positive x to the negative X then you have to set the naming pattern I know that mine is dot L and Dot r with capital letters you can even use custom naming here you can even use tolerance which means that your mesh doesn't need to be perfectly symmetrical and then you can press ok and it will mirror these changes that we did on the positive x side to the negative x side now if you have easy weight which I have disabled just for this tutorial normally I would use it it gives you these symmetry options and here you have similar options for symmetrisings and I covered this in the previous video so that would be another way to symmetrize your weights you're going to need it sooner or later so it's good that we have multiple options for this next we have local weights transfer here I'll assume that you know how to use transfer weights I have a video in which I explain it but if I enable local vertex weight transfer I'll be able to transfer weights between meshes in the same object whereas transfer weights works with two separate objects so the way this works is let's say that I have some sort of prop on this mesh I'm going to join it with the main mesh now if I move the Armature this prop won't move with the arm so I'll go to Weight paint mode actually to edit mode and select the prop then go to Weight paint mode weights menu local weights transfer and choose from unselected to selected and then you can switch the setting from active group to all groups or just the form groups which makes sense and play with some settings and you'll see that the weights were transferred to the prop um some of the weights went to the spine bone I guess so you may want to do some weight painting but these are the basics of local Weight pain transfer and another one from the same developer is local weight transfer copy paste vertex weights I'll be sharing all of these links with you and you can download it from here by clicking the zip button okay I already have it installed copy paste vertex weights when the add-on is active you can go to edit mode and go to the vertex menu and activate copy paste vertex weights and this actually puts you in a special mode here you'll see Ctrl C copy selected Ctrl V base selected and shift and escape to exit now if I go to Weight paint mode and select this bone you'll see the kinds of Weights that I have so if I go to edit mode and let's say I select this Loop of vertices and press Ctrl C and then I'm going to select another loop and pay attention to the active vertex here so I'm going to make sure that the exact same vertex is the active here below and then press Ctrl V and then if I go to Weight paint mode let me see Ctrl C and then in here Ctrl V yeah and these weights were copied from up here to down here so this is not something that you will use in your day-to-day character weight painting but it can be useful for certain Precision tasks another small add-on or additional operator I should say is remove unused vertex groups if you already have easy weights which again and again I recommend your vertex weights menu will look something like this and you have these batch delete operators and they will allow you to batch delete empty or unused groups this is useful when you need to really optimize your mesh for export and such so if you want one more additional operator like this you can download and install this add-on activate it and it will appear here in the same menu remove unused voltage groups and that will Purge all sorts of vertex groups that do not have any weights on them and it will optimize your mesh next we have a couple of add-ons from this Creator here on Gum Road one of their products is a paid one and I'm looking forward to reviewing it in another video but for now if you scroll down there are three weights related add-ons here one is a pop-up vertex group list another one is normalized unlocked and smooth unlocked I'm mainly going to show the pop-up list the other ones I didn't find is useful but you can take a closer look if they look interesting to you so if you install and activate the pop-up vertex group list and go to Weight paint mode under weights you'll find the pop-up vertex group list and if you activate it it will give you a list of all groups that you can click and select so if you don't have the Armature selected right now and you want to access different vertex groups without going to this menu which is kind of small and not easy to work with then you can just use this list here right and switch your vertex groups and I would highly recommend that you add it to your quick favorites so I can easily activate it like this you can also lock and unlock groups here and the nice feature is the relevant groups if I enter vertex select mode and press C and select some vertices and then activate the list this will show me only the groups that are connected to the selected vertices so that's all for this little add-on again I'm not going to go into more details about normalized unlock I think that is similar to using normalize all except that it takes these logs into account and similarly smooth unlock is similar to the smooth function but what it takes into account the locks in the remaining minute or so I'm going to show a couple of add-ons that you may want to take a look I'm not personally using them but they are related to weight painting so maybe worth taking a look we have weight flow which is actually a very complex add-on it attempts to really improve the weight painting workflow it has really cool ideas like pressing the shift key should switch to blur tool and pressing Ctrl subtracts weights So in theory it sounds very good it has a bunch of features but it just didn't work for me some of the features did work some didn't but I couldn't get it to work consistently so maybe your experience will be different so take a look and maybe give it a try here we have another collection of atoms if you go to releases here and download the source code you can install it like an add-on and it's actually a collection of add-ons a lot of these functions actually look really interesting so I may try to explore them in the future like this mystery Target thing I've never seen anything similar to it looks really cool but as far as weight painting there's this bleed option which will allow you to expand a Vertex group that is similar to what we already have here we have weights levels and that allows me to kind of expand the existing weights so that's a similar function that works slightly differently give it a try if you need something like this in the smooth Loops feature looks very cool and very practical but it just doesn't make sense to me right away so I haven't been able to use it in practice so far another interesting one is this Dynamic weight editing using geometry nodes which I believe is a dynamic weights transfer tool so you can use Simple geometry to transfer weights to more complex geometry and it looks very cool but I haven't had the time to take a proper look at it and surface heat diffuse skinning is an add-on that I've mentioned before in my videos it's the same as automatic weights but a little bit more robust so you won't get bone heat waiting error I've demonstrated this add-on in other videos so you can watch them here I'm just mentioning it because it falls into this category of free add-ons that you have to do with weight painting I almost forgot to mention it but there is a CG dive add-on related to weight painting it's called x-ray weight paint I have a dedicated video about it but the gist of it is that by default when you weight paint you only paint on the front of the faces to really paint through the mesh you have to disable front faces and switch full off to project it and it always bothered me that these options are disconnected like this but once you set it up you can paint through the mesh as you can see if I install and activate x-ray weight paint and set things to default the add-on creates this button here so I just have to press it and it will disable front faces only and switch the projected and I can paint through the mesh and if I disable it it automatically switches to front faces only and sphere and then I can only paint um on the front of the mesh and not on the back switch it again and I'll be painting through don't forget to like subscribe and check out academy.cgdive.com if you are interested in exclusive CG dive content

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 9,388

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: jz3CppwWi5c

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2023