The Skin Atelier is meant to manage skinning weights, meaning by that: Bind, Edit and Mirror your skinning weights.

This window is divided in 2 different parts:

The upper part concerns the Duo Skin features (Bind Skin, Auto Smooth) as well as Mirror Skin, Copy Skin and few other features
The down part concerns the Skin Numerical Field Editing

Let's start with the middle part!

Paint & Check mode

All skinning operations must be performed into the "Paint & Check" mode of the Character Bank (

). It means, that these skinning commands are disabled in Bind Pose, Build Pose or Ref Pose

Shift, an essential key during your skinning process

In Rigging/skinning mode, the Shift button (eventually combined with Ctrl and Alt) is a very important key as it allows you to grab your vertices using pick/rectangle selection (LMB) or using lasso selection (MMB). More details about the vertex selection lower in this page.

Check your mesh transformation values before skinning

Before starting skinning or updating your meshes (using the "Update Skinned Mesh" feature), please always check that your mesh transformation values are set to 0,0,0. That will prevent any potential coming issues (in Akeytsu, export warning or issues on export, etc.). You can use the "Reset'n'Freeze" feature available in the Transform window to reset your values.

Duo Skin and other skin features

The Duo Skin process is our new automatic skin workflow developed to provide (far) better and quicker results.

This process is called « Duo Skin » as it is split in 2 different steps:

During the 1st step Akeytsu will bind in rigid your mesh(es) to your skeleton
Then (2nd step), Akeytsu will perform smoothing over 1st step influences

About How our skinning works

Since we use Geodesic Voxels during the 1st step, the skinning should already looks good enough. Experts may still want to tweak and adjust some areas by going back and forth between 1st (rigid) and 2nd steps using the Duo Skin Mode button.

How to use it ?

First of all, use Ctrl+Left Click to gather both desired mesh(es) + desired joint(s). To select the character, go in the Tree window, to select joint(s), it's often easier to parse the picker window (instead of expanding the whole tree hierarchy),
hit the Bind Skin command. It will (pre)bind in rigid your selected mesh(es) to your selected joints and then automatically perform a smoothing straight afterwards. From that moment, you already get your smoothed skin.
If you are pleased with the result you can stop here!
If you want to adjust your skinning, you have got two solutions:
1. Easy & Quick: go back into the Rigid step (by using the Duo Skin Mode button), manually refine your rigid skinning zones (using rigid tools only) and hit the Process Smooth Skin button to perform a new auto-smooth pass.You can then iterate the process on the full skinning or on specific parts as well as setup each joint smoothing strength in front of each one in the Picker window
2. Longer: stay into the Smooth step and manually refine your smooth skinning zones (using smooth tools)

Now discover the features more in details!

The following video not yet up-to-date and still describes the previous way to use Duo Skin. We plan to update it as soon as possible. Thanks for your understanding.

Skin Painter (Shortcut: A): Enable/disable the Painter window toolset

Bind Skin: Bind in rigid the selected meshes to the selected joints and auto-smooth the whole influences straight forward.

Process Smooth Skin: Generate smooth (end) skin from rigid (start) skin according to your joint selection (and potentially vertex selection) as well as the smooth factors displayed into the Picker (once the skin is pre-bound).

What about true rigid characters such as robots or machines?

For this kind of characters, you need to turn "off" the smooth factors - by clicking on the smooth factor icon into the Picker - on all joints before launching the smooth/bind process. Then it will bind/finalize your skinning without smoothing it!

Duo Skin Mode: Display and edit either rigid (start) or smooth (end) skin.

Rigid weights only in 1st step

Please note that in 1st step (Rigid mode) of the Duo Skin Mode, your skinning is just a "pre-skinning" (a kind of blueprint). Since then, it's not allowed to smooth influences so only "rigid" tools are available.

Unbind Skin: Unbind the current skinning, meaning that your skinned mesh(es) return(s) to mesh(es) state. By the way, another method to unbind your skinning is to drag'n'drop your skinned mesh(es) outside the Character node into the Tree window.

Hide Skinned Mesh Vertices: Hide the faces corresponding to the selected vertices. Very useful to skin from the inside of the model or to hide the empty side when you work on your half skinning.

How about adding new vertices to hide?

Once you already hide vertices and in case you make a new selection of vertices, you will notice a little "+" sign appears into the command. At that time, if you hit the command again, this new selection of vertices will be added to hidden vertices. Quick, simple & efficient!

Mirror Skin Weights & Joints: Mirror the skinning weights and the joints in same time. Please notice that the mirroring process works according the YZ plane and the (side) joints must have the following tags in their names : r_/l_/R_/L_ as prefix, or _r/_l/_R/_L as suffix or even right/left/Right/Left anywhere in the name. Then select the side you want to mirror and hit the command. If the joints already exist on the other side, only weights will be mirrored.

Mirroring only joints?

If you go into Bind (or Build) Pose, you will notice that the Mirror command remains enabled and allows to mirror joints only. It displays a slightely different icon

.

How to mirror a specific part of skinning weights?

First select a joint of the source side (needed to determine the "side to mirror"), then select vertices on the destination side. The mirroring effect will be limited to this vertex selection.

Different mirroring rules between weights and joints

The "Mirror Joints Only" works in a "selective" manner, meaning that you select a joint you want to mirror on the other side and only this joint (and its potential fathers) will be mirrored.
The "Mirror Weights" works in a "global" manner, meaning whatever the joints you select (to determine the side to mirror), all vertices will be computed.
The "Mirror Weights & Joints" works logically both manners, "selective" concerning joints and "global" concerning weights. That is why, for simplicity, we recommend to select all side (or all half rig) to mirror all your character (all joints/all weights).

Valid skeleton naming

First, be aware that, in Akeytsu, the objects found under a skeleton are joints, not bones.
Joints which have a mirroring counterpart in the skeleton must be "side-tagged" (as described above)
The other joints must be "not-side-tagged" =>
- Central joints must be "not-side-tagged"
- Joints which must not be mirrored must be "not-side-tagged"
To get a valid skeleton (by valid, we mean that Akeytsu mirroring algorithm will correctly run with such skeletons), a strong rule is:
- A "not-side-tagged" joint must never be found between a "side-tagged" ancestor and a "side-tagged" descendant
Know that, when mirroring is called, if needed, Akeytsu will log that the skeleton has not a valid naming, and will return immediately (doing nothing)