I have used any means to try and smooth out the paint, blurring it out and using the gradient, but regardless of how light I make the edges, this insists:
My only goal is to make so I can manipulate the jaw, no animating, only positioning. But no matter how carefully I blur out the edges, even up to the unrecognizable blue color, the opacity on the weight seems to be 100%.
My first observation is that you do not have a “head” bone, so it’s not surprising that the head deforms when you move the jaw bone. Simple solution is to add a head bone and then do an “Automatic Weights” parent. Remove the current parent, empty the vertex groups and remove the armature modifier before you attempt to re-parent the mesh to the rig.
Make the jaw bone a child of the head bone, so it inherits rotation and scale. Also check you have no unapplied rotations or scales on either the armature (in Object mode) or the mesh. You can clear these with CTRL+A => “Rotation and Scale”.
Otherwise - post the blend file for us to look at. You can upload the blend file to pasteall.org/blend then post the link here.
Cheers, Clock.
PS. Single bone rigs for any character like yours do not work as you have nothing to keep the rest of the mesh still when you move the jaw.
Okay, so what you’re telling me is that I cannot have proper weighting unless a bone is adjointed with another one, i.e. the head one? That made perfect sense, and indeed once I added a head + neck bone (In fact I added a meta-rig dummy Rigify addon and just deleted everything except the head+neck bones) it seemed to appropriately treat the paint levels, and yeah, unfortunately the jaw moved the whole head like you said, so it was very impractical to try and manipulate the jaw.
BUT THEN, I tried something. I deleted the jaw bone (the one that moved the entire head) and moved just the head bone in to the jaw’s position… It still recognized the paint values and I ended up moving the jaw properly with only 1 bone…
Well now I’m -really- confused. Because this would suggest that there -are- some parameter options or clicks or checks or options that determine whether or not the paint values get calculated into the bone? Maybe the left-overs from the deleted meta-rig dummy?
gee, I’m not sure if I’m even making sense to myself, let alone anyone else… I’d upload a file but I’m not sure which one to upload, since so far I keep jumping between saved files and spend more time troubleshooting than actually progressing.
