by Artell·Workflow
Images © Artell. Used for product review; image policy.
Skin Selection earns its place in the superhive library for turning bone controller selection into a click on the mesh, with support extended through recent Blender releases up to 5.0.
Skin Selection is a Blender addon for selecting bone controllers by clicking directly on the mesh surface, and it is compatible with any rig or armature. You set it up under the Vertex Groups Creation label by adding up to three bone controllers and clicking Create VGroup, which adds a corresponding vertex group marked with an "fs:" prefix for face selection. After assigning faces or vertices to the group, you can optionally use Mirror Selected VGroup to mirror it to the other side.
Clicking Start displays only the meshes. From there, clicking an area selects the first mapped controller, holding Shift selects the second, and Alt selects the third. Display parameters such as color and alpha can be adjusted, and pressing Escape or the Stop button returns to normal mode.
Performance is generally fine for models of around 25,000 polygons, though bone selection may slow down with surface subdivision turned on. Recent releases extended compatibility through Blender 4.3 to 5.0, added a button to clear the mesh cache, and fixed the compatibility breakage with Blender 5.0.
Skin Selection is best for riggers and animators who want to pick bone controllers by clicking directly on the character mesh.
Skin Selection is completely free to download and use.
Skin Selection was originally documented for Blender 2.79 and 2.8x, and later releases extended its reach considerably. The changelog notes Blender 4.0 support, Blender 4.2 support with the addon offered as an Extension, and extended support for Blender 4.3 through 5.0. The most recent update fixes a compatibility breakage with Blender 5.0. Note that on current versions, vertex group names exceeding 63 characters throw an error, with a refactor planned to support long bone names in the future.
Skin Selection can produce incorrect selections in orthographic mode. To avoid this, switch to perspective mode using numpad key 5. Separately, the selection highlight backface culling does not work properly on Blender 2.9x versions, which is a documented known issue. Keeping the viewport in perspective is the recommended way to get accurate clicks on the mesh surface when picking controllers.
Skin Selection requires specific naming when mirror modifiers are used: the bone controller names must end with a two-character side suffix, such as "hand.l" or "hand_L" for the left and "hand.r" or "hand_R" for the right. In addition, if multiple bones are included in a single vertex group, they must all be from the same side. Following these naming rules lets the Mirror Selected VGroup option copy a side-specific group across to the opposite side correctly.
Skin Selection performs well for models made of roughly 25,000 polygons. With surface subdivision turned on, bone selection may become slower. For better performance in that case, the documentation suggests using Subsurf's Open Subdiv feature, which is noted as Blender 2.79 only for now. Later releases also improved cache performance and added a button to clear the mesh cache, which is useful after editing the vertex groups.
Skin Selection is listed as free in this catalog, so no price is shown here. For current licensing terms and any conditions of use, check the developer's page on superhive, where the addon is published by Artell. A demo video is also available if you want to see how the vertex group setup and click-to-select workflow works before installing. The addon selects bone controllers by clicking the mesh surface and is compatible with any rig or armature, so you can try the workflow on your own characters.
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