Adaptive Auto Skinning is a new Blender add-on for automatic weighting. Like Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning, it aims to replace Blender’s automatic weights on complex characters, where those often fail with “Bone Heat Weighting: failed” or produce low-quality results.
Strengths
- Speed. It runs on the GPU, which makes it a lot faster than CPU-based alternatives.
- Stable body weights. Layered clothing, props and small parts stay attached to the body instead of separating.
- Fingers. With default settings, it weights the fingers properly, so they didn’t need any special treatment.
- Faces with Auto-Rig Pro. For Auto-Rig Pro rigs, it has a dedicated facial mode (Skin Facial Rig - ARP Only) that sets ideal resolution settings and handles the face separately. On my test cases, that worked really well and it’s the closest we get to a robust full character weighting with 1-click.
Limitations
Outside of Auto-Rig Pro, the face won’t weight well: as with other voxel-style methods, nearby geometry like the lips gets fused. For Rigify and custom rigs, you’ll still need to handle the face separately, for example with standard automatic weights.
Adaptive Auto Skinning vs Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning
Body results from the two addons are very similar. Adaptive Auto Skinning is faster thanks to the GPU, handles fingers better by default, and solves Auto-Rig Pro faces really well.
Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning has the edge for Rigify users, thanks to its new Auto Fusion Skinning feature with a Rigify preset.
My take: if you don’t own either add-on and don’t specialize in Rigify, Adaptive Auto Skinning currently looks like the better choice.
Comparison of the two addons at a glance:
The information below is based on what I saw in my tests. The two addons are in active development so things may change.
Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning
- better with Rigify rigs
- supports a wider range of custom rigs because Auto Fusion Skinning can be customized
- has more options and settings (good for tinkerers)
- can be SLOW
Adaptive Auto Skinning
- currently better with Auto-Rig Pro rigs
- simpler UI and settings, great if you want a one-click solution
- runs on the GPU, very FAST!