Easy Weights Review
Easy Weights is my second highest recommended addon for Weight Painting along with Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning.
Easy Weights offers a host of quality of live improvements to the weight painting process. It is developed “in-house” by one of the Blender developers and it is completely free.
Here are some of the cool features that will make your weight painting expereince more pleasant.
In Weight Paint mode, the addon offers a handy menu that gives you quick acces to the most useful settings and sliders. It will actually allow you to work faster because you will no longer have to go through multiple menus and sub-menus to get to the setting you need.
Another great feature is a special way to enter weight paint mode. By default, you need to select your rig, then the mesh that is bound to it, then enter weight paint mode. This gives you access to your bones while painting weights and it is an essential Blender workflow. With Easy Weights, you just need to select the mesh and use the addon’s dedicated Weight Paint toggle. This will automatically select the armature, saving you unnecessary clicks. It may not sound like much but when you are doing a lot of weight painting, you will come to appreciate it.
The addon also extends the Vertex Groups menus with various cool tools:
- a set of tools for deleting and cleaning up Vertex Groups
- tools to simplify the mirroring or symmetrizing of Vertex Groups
- a tool to unhide the deform bones while weight painting (impossible to do by default)
- and more™