Easy Weights ​

Easy Weights is an addon focused on quality of life improvements for weight painting in Blender.

Table of Contents ​

• Installation
• How to Use
  • Entering Weight Paint Mode
  • Weight Paint Context Menu
  • Hunting Rogue Weights
  • Vertex Group Operators
  • Force Apply Mirror Modifier
• Previous Features

Installation ​

1. Download latest release
2. Launch Blender, navigate to Edit > Preferences select Addons and then Install,
3. Navigate to the downloaded add-on and select Install Add-on

How to Use ​

Read the paragraphs below to find out how to boost your weight painting workflow and comfort.

Entering Weight Paint Mode ​

An operator called "Toggle Weight Paint" is added under the "Object" and "Weight" menus in the 3D View. You can right-click the operator in either of these locations to assign a shortcut. I use pie menu object modes on Tab, so my Ctrl+Tab shortcut is available for this.

The operator will switch into weight paint mode without having to select both the armature and the mesh. Just select a mesh and press the shortcut you assigned. The armature will be un-hidden and put into pose mode if necessary. Press the shortcut again to reset the armature object's visibility state to what it was before, and go back to Object Mode.

Weight Paint Context Menu ​

The add-on will override Blender's built-in "W" shortcut for the Context Menu in weight paint mode. Simply enter Weight Paint mode and press W after installing the add-on.

This pop-up panel provides quick access to commonly needed tools, whether they are part of core Blender or the addon:

• Toggles for the Accumulate, Front Faces Only and Falloff Shape brush options. These are normally per-brush, but these buttons will affect ALL Weight Paint brushes.
• Weight Paint settings: Auto-Normalize, Multi-Paint, X-Mirror.
• A new "Clean Weights" option. When enabled, this will remove 0-weights after every brush stroke.
• Commonly used Overlay and Armature display settings.
• Commonly used or new operators.

Hunting Rogue Weights ​

The addon provides a workflow for hunting down rogue weights efficiently but safely, with just the right amount of automation. This functionality can be found in the Sidebar->EasyWeight->Weight Islands panel.

• After pressing Calculate Weight Islands and waiting a few seconds, you will see a list of all vertex groups which consist of more than a single island.
• Clicking the magnifying glass icon will focus the smallest island in the group, so you can decide what to do with it.
• If the island is rogue weights, you can subtract them and go back to the previous step. If not, you can press the checkmark icon next to the magnifying glass, and the vertex group will be hidden from the list.
• Continue with this process until all entries are gone from the list.
• In the end, you can be 100% sure that you have no rogue weights anywhere on your mesh.

Vertex Group Operators ​

The Vertex Groups context menu is re-organized with more icons and better labels, as well as some additional operators:

• Delete Empty Deform Groups: Delete deforming groups that don't have any weights.
• Delete Unused Non-Deform Groups: Delete non-deforming groups that aren't used anywhere, even if they do have weights.
• Delete Unselected Deform Groups: Delete all deforming groups that don't correspond to a selected pose bone. Only in Weight Paint mode.
• Focus Deforming Bones: Reveal and select all bones deforming this mesh. Only in Weight Paint mode.
• Symmetrize Vertex Groups: Symmetrizes vertex groups from left to right side, creating missing groups as needed.

If you have any more suggestions, feel free to open an Issue with a feature request.

Force Apply Mirror Modifier ​

In Blender, you cannot apply a mirror modifier to meshes that have shape keys.
This operator tries to anyways, by duplicating your mesh, flipping it on the X axis and merging into the original. It will also flip vertex groups, shape keys, shape key masks, and even (attempt) shape key drivers, assuming everything is named with .L/.R suffixes.

Previous Features ​

Over time as more things have been fixed on Blender's side, some features have been removed. To avoid confusion, these are listed here:

• As of Blender 3.1, holding the Ctrl and Shift buttons in weight painting will use the Subtract and Blur brushes respectively, removing the need for the shortcuts on the 1, 2, 3 keys this addon used to add to provide quick brush switching.
• As of Blender 3.0, the weight paint overlay is no longer multiplied on top of the underlying colors, removing the need for this addon to change shading or object display settings when using the Toggle Weight Paint mode operator.