The ‘Helper Tools’ menu is a collection of convenience tools designed to speed up rigging, in particular for users who are new to rigging.
- ‘Skin Selected’ – Once the rig has been built and you are ready to start skinning, select the character meshes and click this button. It will set the character to ‘bind pose’ and create a skinCluster on every mesh with all the skinning joints in the scene as influences.
When a character mesh already has a skinCluster, it will add any skinning joints that aren’t already part of the skinCluster as influences.As of version 1.00.07, An options menu that resembles Maya’s ‘Bind Skin Options’ was added but with some attributes removed that conflict with Arise logic.
- ‘Prune Weights (0.01)’ – The same as Maya’s ‘Prune Small Weights‘ tool.
- ‘Remove Unused Influences’ – The same as Maya’s ‘Remove Unused Influences‘.
- ‘Normalize Weights’ – The same as Maya’s ‘Normalize Weights‘.
- ‘Transfer Weights (Placeholder -> Joint) – You can transfer weights from a placeholder to a skinning joint by selecting the placeholder and then the joint.
To transfer more at a time, zigzag select placeholders and joints [placeholder, joint, placeholder, joint, …]. - ‘Transfer Placeholder Weights By Name’ – Transfer weights when the placeholder and joint share the same name. For example, when deleting a node and then creating a new node of the same type and name, the weights of the old node will not get transferred automatically.
- ‘Weights Transfer Tool’ – You can use this tool to transfer weights from joints with a specific suffix to joints with another suffix. There is no need to select anything; ensure the nodes are in ‘Build’ mode.
Check the Log Viewer for feedback. - ‘Select Skinning Joints’ – Selects only the joints in the scene that are tagged as skinning joints. (there are joints that are not meant to be skinned).
- ‘Select All Ctrls’ – Selects all of the ctrls in the scene.
- ‘From Selected Meshes Select Influences’ – Selects the joints influencing the skinning on selected meshes.
- ‘Toggle All Joints ‘displayLocalAxis’ – Display or hide all the joints orientation gizmo.
- ‘Delete Unused Maya Nodes’ – Helps keep the scene clean by removing Maya nodes that are not connected to anything.
- ‘Scale Ctrls’ – Starting from version 1.00.07, there’s a ‘Scale Ctrls’ slider that can scale selected ctrls or all the ctrls in the scene if none are selected. To preserve changes, you also need to use ‘CtrlsShape’ attachments. You can speed up the process by using the ‘Batch’ > ‘Add CtrlsShape To Selected Nodes’ and ‘Batch’ > ‘Save All CtrlsShape Attachments’ options.
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