It’s been almost a year since I first made ngSkinTools available to public, but only now finally managed to get together some sort of proper demo. This is primarily targeted to those who have never heard of ngSkinTools, and will not be big news to current plugin users - those of you can feel free to spam a friend or colleague:]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzMtHZbDnAY
https://vimeo.com/57454734
Cool, thanks. I’ve heard good things about this but not had a chance to check it out.
Cheers,
Brian
simply the best free pluggin available anywhere, can’t do without it anymore :bounce:
Great great job on it!
Great looking tool! 
Is anybody else getting an error when trying to run the Maya 2009x64 version? The .mll files loads fine, but when I click the shelf-button, I’m getting a Python-related error and the UI wont load.
I tried it on a machine that runs Maya 2012 with the respective installer and everything seems to work fine there. I haven’t really gotten beyond the initial UI load though, but am looking forward to giving this an extensive test run. It looks very promising!
Thanks a lot for sharing, Viktoras, and keep up the great work!
Cheers!
gah - could be, I sometimes rush a build breaking something on some maya verson. This reminds me I really have to finish automated setup that runs tests on all mayas, as I’m too lazy to do that by hand each time.
beta is beta!
in the future, please report problems to ngskintools user list or to me personally (there’s links in several places on ngskintools.com).
I’m not complaining, I’m just asking. 
Sure, will do. Is there a mailing list to sign up for to stay informed about updates?
Cheers!
There’s user list on google, but I try to use it only for bug reports, feature discussions and other user-inspired talk.
https://groups.google.com/group/ngskintools/about
For news, it’s best to subscribe to news rss.
http://www.ngskintools.com/feeds/news.xml
The plugin also has “check for updates” function if all you’re interested in is if there’s a new version available (I understand you’ll need to get t up and running first, though).
You can also follow me on twitter (@viktorasm) - but it’s not directly ngSkinTools related, so it will contain other info which you might not need.
…feel free to spam a friend or colleague
Yes, this tool is really amazing. Like… really!
One thing I’ve noticed is that people don’t immediately get it when I tell them about. I suppose it just sounds too good to be true, and some of the concepts are hard to explain. But when I show somebody… well lets just say they get it straight away!
Well done Viktoras. And thankyou for so much of your hard work.
The demo vid is a nice teaser, but I would also recommend the layers tute vid http://www.ngskintools.com/tutorials/layers-intro
(sorry Vik, I know you said you didnt like the voice over, but I think its still a pretty cool intro since layers vs locking is the big conceptual shift that changes skin weighting forever)
David
Thanks David, you’ve been a great support to the project:)
Now that I got demo out of my way, I want to sit down to the pile of bugs I discovered while making the demo:) After that, I plan to dedicate some time to proper feature-focused tutorials. The teaser was just for solving the exact problem you described - to sum up quickly what this weird plugin is all about.
This has changed my daily workflow completely. Only started using it last week and I have placed Maya’s skinning tools in a chest in the attic to be forgotten. This is now THEE way to skin. Completely revolutionary and a huge thanks to uiron. You really need a paypal donation button on your site. I’m sure many users are thankful enough to contribute to your hard work.
EDIT: Maybe your next project can be ngMuscleTools
I just installed and briefly tested the updated beta version in Maya 2009 and the menu etc starts up without an error. I’ll try to work with it on the weekend to experience for myself what it can do. The plugin demos simply look great. Thanks a lot, Viktoras! 
Cheers!
TheRazorsEdge - if you keep experiencing errors, drop a message in users mailing list, we’ll see into it. You’ll find contacts on the website.
Only issue I’ve experienced with this is it takes literally 10 minutes to open up a higher-res file with 7 layers + the base layer. “File read in 592 seconds”. Don’t mind too much as it saves me a lot more time than that. Not sure if it could be optimized
it’s a known issue that ASCII files (.ma) take a while to load. Use binary files, it should go away. If not, I’ll need more details as I could not recreate slowiness with .mb files.
Edit: what I meant is “it’s a known bug in ngSkinTools”, not to imply that there’s something wrong with binary files in general:)