Best software for weight painting?

FiftyTifty

While I've been learning how to make textures with Substance Designer, which is much better for making proper textures and normal maps than Photoshop is, I thought popped into my head. Rather than use an all-purpose 3D modelling software like 3DS Max for weight painting, posing, animating, etc. are there 3D programs kicking about that offer more intuitive and refined workflows for those individual tasks? An example would be using Mudbox instead of 3DS Max to create organic models, as sculpting is just better in almost every way, especially for painting on the model.

Are there any equivalents for those?

oglu

Maya with two great plugins does a good job. 
https://www.ngskintools.com/
http://www.braverabbit.com/braverabbit/tools/brsmoothweights/

FiftyTifty

Oh my, ngskintools looks great. Thanks for that, that looks way better than 3DS Max's crude system.

oglu

Maya is pushing hard in the Animation direction. 2020 does have a new foundation for rigging tools. I hope we will see some new stuff also for weighting in an update. 

Mark Dygert

As a Maya user, start using geodesic voxel binding. It gets 80-90% of the way there. It's been a huge gift of time. 

Max's system hasn't been updated in years but it WAS better than Maya for a really long time, which wasn't saying much, out of the box without Geodesic Voxel skinning they both still suck. At least max had actual envelope skinning for 10 years before Maya finally got off their asses and half assed capsule skinning. 

For Max users, check out https://www.bonespro.com/ it's been rock solid for years and I wouldnt' do any skinning in 3dsmax without it.

JoseConseco

I have made this pluging for blender: https://joseconseco.github.io/WeightPaintToolsDocs/main_pie/
It is quite simple, but gets the job done.  And there is this addon form another dev: https://blendermarket.com/products/voxel-heat-diffuse-skinning
That gives you better starting weights, compared to default blender algorithm. 

throttlekitty

Mark Dygert said:

As a Maya user, start using geodesic voxel binding. It gets 80-90% of the way there. It's been a huge gift of time. 

Max's system hasn't been updated in years but it WAS better than Maya for a really long time, which wasn't saying much, out of the box without Geodesic Voxel skinning they both still suck. At least max had actual envelope skinning for 10 years before Maya finally got off their asses and half assed capsule skinning. 

For Max users, check out https://www.bonespro.com/ it's been rock solid for years and I wouldnt' do any skinning in 3dsmax without it.

Since we're talking about weights, is there any *easy* way for maya to not totally botch flood-smoothing? Say I have a cylinder, and joints 1,2,3, like an arm. I lock 3 and try to smooth the boundary between 1 and 2, but maya will also put weights from 1 on the far side, into 3's territory.

I guess I already know the obvious answer is "don't do that", but it's annoying when you're flipping around working on a skin and realize you missed a spot. This is more centered around where I want an even smooth and don't trust doing it in multiple brush strokes while rotating the camera.

oglu

Brave Rabbits free plugin i posted above is pure magic for smoothing weights. 

throttlekitty

I do use it, and it is great! But it's still a brush-based solution, unless there's something I'm missing in there.

Eric Chadwick

To be fair, 3ds Max hasn't entirely languished in weighting features. It now has a Geodesic Voxel Solver and a Heat Map Solver. http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-97016957-BCD6-469B-8AC6-776B2C1334B7

I haven't skinned in a while, so there's probably more including third party scripts/plugins...?

Anyway, the toughest part may be moving a rigged model between packages, since there really is no way that I know of to translate any kind of nice rig between apps. IIRC FBX only supports simple FK rigs. So, whatever tool you're using ultimately for animation, is probably where you need to do all the weighting too.

RN

There's this weight flood-filling method that's taught in workshops, it's called "inside out":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu73Yqgju14
On Maya you're fine, but if you're on Blender you can do this method by using the Normalize Unlocked add-on (link in my signature).