Weight Paint Deformations

I’ve been working on a human for 2 days, but every time I parent the skeleton to the model, the legs bend the wrong way. I rotate the pole as I saw in an instructional vid, getting the skeleton to move correctly. However, when I then paint weights, the model deforms extremely – as in, when I make it even slightly green, it deforms while I’m painting.

I then tried fixing the leg’s pole angles before parenting, but even then, the weight painting always causes extreme deformities. It only seems to paint correctly when the pole angle is 0, but in most cases, having it at 0 doesn’t allow for the leg to move correctly.

I saw an instructional video on this, and the artist was easily able to change the pole angle without affecting the weight painting.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Animation and Rigging”

Would it be possible for you to share your .blend file for others to investigate?

My suspicion is that you didn’t apply scale and/or rotation on your mesh prior to adding the armature modifier.

What do you mean by apply scale and rot?

Before adding the Armature modifier to your mesh, it’s good practice to apply scale and rotation (Ctrl+A in Object mode). If you scaled or otherwise rotated your armature in Object mode, you should probably use Ctrl+A there as well. And, in general, I also prefer to make sure the origins for my armature object and character mesh are in the exact same location, too.

Short explanation: Blender uses the base location, rotation, and scale for both objects as part of how it calculates deformation. Ideally, your X, Y, and Z rotations in Object mode should be 0 degrees and the X, Y, and Z scales in Object mode should be 1.0 before parenting your mesh to the armature.