Issues with Weight Painting

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello Blender Artists! This is my first post on the forums and, after using Blender for about 5 months, I’m excited to finally join the community!

I got this book called “Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity” by Chris Totten. I haven’t been following all the steps EXACTLY as it’s told because I’m making it sort of a ‘crash course’ in character creation. I intend on reading it through again and take notes on what didn’t sink in this first time and base the model on myself.

Now on to the problem I’m encountering…

I’m currently at the ‘Weight Painting for Accurate Deformations’ section in Chapter 7: Rigging For Realistic Movement, and I can’t get the ‘Weight from Bones’ menu to show. First of all, the steps before said that choosing a bone in the armature while in Pose Mode then Shift+RMB-ing the mesh and entering Weight Paint Mode would keep the armature in Pose Mode and make the mesh in Weight Paint Mode. That’s not the case.

I’m trying to learn at a constant pace, but getting stuck like this isn’t helping. Does anyone know how or why this isn’t working the way it should, or have suggestions on how to weight paint? Any direction would be great. :smiley:

-LastFable

2

Welcome to the Blender community!
If I understand your question right, to get the weight painting working you have to:

  1. Parent your object under the armature, (You’ve probably done this already)
  2. With the armature selected, hit Ctrl+TAB to enter pose mode.
  3. Then from the outliner, select the object then hit Ctrl+TAB to enter weight painting mode.

You can now select the bones by right-clicking them, and you can rotate, move, and scale the bones.

Hope this helps you!

3

Thanks for a timely reply! I feel rather silly now because I actually didn’t parent the mesh to the armature or use a modifier… I elected to just go ahead and restart the book and not skip anything and take notes. At my skill level, I can’t really afford to overlook things if I’m aiming to understand the whole process of animating and know how to troubleshoot whenever errors occur.