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Swap Skin Weights

About

Swap Skin Weights is a utility that swaps skin influence weights between two joints on a skinned mesh, vertex by vertex.

Use it when you need to:

  • Fix left/right or twist joint influence mixups or twist joints influence mixups
  • Reassign weights after renaming or reparenting joints.
  • Transfer influence from one joint to another without repainting everything from scratch.

It exchanges the weights exactly: wherever Joint A had a weight of 0.7, Joint B gets 0.7 after the swap, and vice versa. All other influences and overall balance stay unchanged.

How to open

  • Open BroTools main menu in Maya.
  • Go to: Rigging Tools -> Swap Skin Weights.

Step-by-step usage

  1. With the window open, select your skinned mesh in the viewport.
  2. Click Use Sel in the Mesh section.
  3. The mesh name appears in the Mesh field.
  4. Select a joint that is the root of your skeleton (for example, the root joint or spine root).
  5. Click Use Sel in the Skeleton Root section.
  6. Click Build.

  7. This populates the Joint A and Joint B dropdowns with all joints under the chosen root.

  8. Choose:

  9. Joint A: the joint whose weights you want to move out.
  10. Joint B: the joint whose weights you want to move in.
  11. Click Swap Weights.

The swap happens immediately on the mesh.