Brave Rabbit’s Ingo Clemens decided to update some of his tools and make them open source.
Brave Rabbit’s Ingo Clemens decided to update some of his tools and make them open source. One of the tools is brSmoothWeights that replaces the former smoothSkinClusterWeight tool.
brSmoothWeights is said to be completely rewritten. The tool comes with its own paint tool which provides a better performance throughout. Adjusting the size and strength is said to reflect the behavior of the default Maya sculpt tools. The artist states the tool is now multi-threaded and with large speed improvements. “A new selection mode streamlines fast vertex selection without having to switch tools. Use this to constrain the smoothing to a certain area or to keep the vertices from being smoothed. A valuable addition is the smoothing depth option,” wrote the developer. You can smooth the front and back side of the mesh without having to rotate the model. Also, the smoothing can be applied to posed meshes with overlapping geometry.
“By default brSmoothWeights smoothes across shell boundaries to maintain the integrity of the mesh when deformed. This feature takes away a bit of the overall smoothing performance but shouldn’t be noticeable with regular meshes. If you are working with high-resolution single-shell meshes it’s still possible to disable this option to improve the speed.”
What is more, the new volume-based smoothing lets users smooth across several discontinuous shells whereas the default smoothing is surface-based.
You can learn more and get the tool here.