Hey everyone, I’ve been heads-down on this for a while and it’s finally at a point I’m happy sharing: WeightForge, an addon aimed at the part of rigging nobody enjoys, cleaning up vertex weights and figuring out why a deformation looks wrong. The problem I kept running into on my own projects: you pose a rig, something pinches at the shoulder, and then it’s 10 minutes of scrubbing the timeline and squinting at the mesh trying to figure out *which* vertex is the culprit. WeightForge grew out of wanting a faster answer to that specific question. What it does, in short: - **Diagnostics** — scans the mesh and tells you specifically what’s wrong (zero-weight vertices, bones fighting each other at a seam, groups that don’t sum to 1.0), instead of a generic “issues found” -
**One-click cleanup** — fixes the boring, obvious stuff (dead weights, unnormalized groups, too many influences per vertex) without touching the parts of your weight paint that are already fine - **Smart Binding** — a joint-aware starting bind, meant to be a better jumping-off point than the default automatic weights, not a replacement for doing it properly - **Weight Transfer** — copies weights between meshes with different topology (handy for clothing sitting on a body mesh) - **Deformation Debugger** — this is the one I built mainly for myself: pose the rig and get a live heatmap of exactly which vertices are causing the twist/pinch, click one to jump to its weight groups None of this replaces actually knowing how to weight paint — a hero face rig or a shoulder that needs to survive extreme poses still wants a human doing the final pass. What I was trying to cut down was the hours of baseline cleanup before you get to that part. Still ironing out edge cases (currently testing more on non-humanoid rigs), so if anyone tries it and hits something weird, I’d genuinely like to hear about it ,that’s more useful to me than praise at this stage.
WeightForge — Smart Binding, Weight Transfer & Deformation Debugger for Blender - Superhive (formerly Blender Market) if anyone wants to poke at it. Happy to answer questions about how any of it works under the hood.