In this post I will document and detail my process throughout weight painting as well as any issues I ran into.
Weight painting is the process of adding influence and depth to a characters limbs and assets in order to replicate a natural movement. This also prevents parts of the body moving unnecessarily when another asset is controlled. For example when the arm moves, it is common that parts of the ribs with move when they don’t need to which is the reason weight painting is an important aspect of character rigging.
The way I decided to weight paint was in sections, this allowed me to control the weight and keep everything organised. By flooding an entire body part at the top of the hierarchy, it allows me to individually control the different sections of the chosen part. In the images below I have painted the different sections so that when the arm moves, all the sections will move in their own way while still being connected to the body correctly. If there is too much influence from the forearm to the wrist for example, the arm would not move naturally and can cause issues when it comes to animating.
I used this same technique with the legs of the character. By working in sections, I was able to control the amount of influence each body part has and change this if needed. The leg was fairly simple as it is two main sections, follow. by the ankle. One issue that I encountered however was I was putting too much influence on the knee which caused the leg to bend in an unnatural state. This was fixed by painting more influence closer to the knee while having the leg joint selected.
