Crazy distortion with automatic weight rigging

I’ve seen soooo many threads for this problem already but nothing seems to have worked.

Here’s the lowdown:

I created a mesh for a character (guess who it is) and it looks alright. I’ve also got a basic skeleton rigged up. Nothing fancy. She looks like this:



But as soon as I parent the armature to the mesh and move a bone, hoo boy. we get this mess.


I’ve tried recalculating normals, removing doubles, turning x-axis mirroring off, recalculating normals AGAIN, applying rotation and scaling, so much garbage, but same results each time.

I’ve rigged this character before without issue but I decided to go back to an earlier version to add more detail. After rigging it some again, it’s started acting up. Before I rigged the skeleton, I rigged the eyes and face with a tutorial from cgcookie and it worked great. But applying anything to the body makes it go nuts.

The file is below (I think). If you can figure it out, you are my personal jesus christ.
figure_not_2001_game_version.blend (1.68 MB)

EDIT: Fixed by adding faces inside the eyesockets. Lesson learned, never put holes in a mesh you want to use an armature on.

Well so far all I’ve got is that if I parent the mesh to the armature with automatic weights, Blender for some reason assigns all the weights to the two bones “bottom lip” and “foot right”. No, I don’t know why. But that’s what it does.

Yeah, i forgot to uncheck “deform” on bottomlip. Thanks for catching that. But as for the bigger issue…dunno still. I saved a new version of the file and am redoing the rig, so i’ll come back with results when I finish. But if we could get this version to work that’d be perferable.

EDIT: Nope, new rig doesn’t work either.

One thing I did find is that your left limbs are labelled “r” and your right limbs are labelled “l”, when I swapped them, I got a slightly more rational automatic weighting, but it was still all over the place, patches of red all over the body. Blender doesn’t seem to like your mesh at all for some reason.

Ahhh, it WAS the mesh! I filled the holes in the eye sockets and now it works perfectly for the most part! Also thanks for telling me about the naming convention when it comes to .l and .r, i’ll go swap the names now.

The only big problem is the eyeballs don’t follow the head, which i expected since they were their own objects. I can probably figure that out myself though. Here’s how the joints look now:


Did you fix it? it deformed OK for me. the head is not good and that is because of the mesh at the head is open and maybe you need to make the hair a separate object. Put the elbow bone inside the mesh as much as you can.