Two local engines generate your weights, every result is a version you can keep and compare, and painting and smoothing refine whichever pass is active.
TWO ENGINES, ONE MENU
This station is where Human + AI is most literal: the machine proposes weights, you judge them in motion, and you decide what happens next. Accept, regenerate, or take over by hand.
The machine's move first. Generate Skin offers two engines, both local:
- Geodesic Voxel solves in seconds on any machine. Distances travel through the character's body instead of straight lines, so fingers resting near a leg never steal leg weights, and rigid parts (armor plates, props) bind hard to their bone. Deterministic: the same character always gets the same weights. It is a working starting point on any hardware, not a rival to the AI tier.
- SkinTokens is the AI engine, running on your own GPU, and the best weights Armature can produce.
Results from either land in the pass library:
- Create new pass adds a fresh version alongside the others. Nothing is overwritten.
- Overwrite current re-solves into the active pass and keeps its name. One undo brings the old weights back.
- Compare shows two passes side by side on the same exercise, so "which skin is better" is something you see, not something you remember.
REFINEMENT TOOLS
Then your move. When a character deserves production-level weights, the hand tools take over, on whichever pass is active.
- Painting with Add and Replace that mean what they say: the influence you paint reaches exactly the value you asked for, locked influences never move, and the remainder is taken proportionally from unlocked ones.
- Flood applies the same operation to a whole selection. Grow and shrink the selection ring by ring with Shift + > and Shift + <.
- Hammer and Chisel smooths weights toward the selection average, with falloff profiles for soft domes and hard peaks.
- The wiggle lets you grab any joint in the Skin station and pose it to see deformation at a spot the exercises do not cover. Scrub the timeline and it snaps back. Your animation preview is never contaminated by a test pose, and undo pops the test pose first.
The loop is the moat: move joints, re-skin, compare, keep. Because passes are versioned, fixing a joint placement never costs you a skin you liked.
AUTOSKIN: THE AI ENGINE, ON YOUR MACHINE
AutoSkin generates skin weights and can propose full skeletons. It runs entirely on your own GPU. Nothing about your characters is uploaded anywhere.
It is a one-time optional download of roughly 9 GB (the inference engine and its model weights), offered on first launch and always available later under Generate Skin. Armature installs it, proves it end to end with a real test rig, and turns the feature on. The download resumes where it left off if interrupted, and everything else in Armature works without it.
Requirements: an NVIDIA GPU with at least 6 GB of VRAM (8 GB recommended).
Not taking the download, or no NVIDIA GPU? Geodesic Voxel ships built in, so every machine can skin from the first minute, and the AI tier is one download away whenever you want it.