If there is one Weight Painting addon I recommend, it would have to be Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning. Voxel Heat is an automatic weighting algorithm similar to Blender’s “Automatic Weights”.
However, unlike Automatic Weights, Voxel Heat never fails to produce a result (no more “Bone Heat Weighting failed” error, yay!). And in most cases the results from Voxel Heat are great.
This addon shines when weighting complex areas such as overlapping meshes (think clothing over body, props attached on the main mesh, etc.).
However, even Voxel Heat isn’t perfect. The same algorithm that is responsible for nicely weighting overlapping meshes, also creates a common problem: it tends to fuse together areas that need to be separate. For example, the mouth and fingers of humanoid characters often get skinned in an undesirable way.
So it is best to use this addon as a tool and not a magic wand. Understand it’s strengths and learn to work around its weaknesses and it will serve you well.
“Automatic Weights” generally works great in the areas where Voxel Heat fails and vice-versa. So the two complement each other beautifully. Throw a little manual weight painting into the mix and you have a powerful workflow capable of weighting any character with ease.
A video below demonstrates CGDive’s workflow. It demonstrates the common problems you may encounter, and how to solve them.
Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning Updates
The addon was recently updated with more alnow has several algorithms that solve some of the issues
- Adaptive: a newer algorithm that’s meant to be faster and more accurate. With default settings it took about 9 seconds on my test character. Raising the subdivide depth made it take around 2 minutes. Overall, however, I wasn’t very impressed with it as it still fuses together close-by geometry such as fingers and face.
- Auto Fusion Skinning: the NEWEST addition and the one I highly recommend. It uses a mix of voxel weighting for the body and standard automatic weights for a set of “mask bones” such as fingers and face. It ships with presets for Rigify and Auto-Rig Pro, and you can define custom mask bones for your own rigs.
Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning vs Adaptive Auto Skinning
Recently, another similar addon called Adaptive Auto Skinning was released. I can’t say for sure but it is possible that the updates in Voxel Heat were prompted by the release of the new addon.
Both addons produce very similar voxel weights. Adaptive Auto Skinning runs on the GPU, so it’s much faster, and in my tests it weights the fingers properly with default settings. It also has a near one-click face solution, but only for Auto-Rig Pro rigs. Voxel Heat currently has the better solution for Rigify, through Auto Fusion Skinning.
Comparison of the two addons at a glance:
The information below is based on what I saw in my tests. The two addons are in active development so things may change.
Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning
- better with Rigify rigs
- supports a wider range of custom rigs because Auto Fusion Skinning can be customized
- has more options and settings (good for tinkerers)
- can be SLOW
Adaptive Auto Skinning
- currently better with Auto-Rig Pro rigs
- simpler UI and settings, great if you want a one-click solution
- runs on the GPU, very FAST!