I posted this in the blender 2.8 thread but have not gotten any reply. Hopefully someone here will be able to.
I’ve been trying to weight paint my character in 2.8 but can’t find a solution to painting vertex groups by selecting bones.
I know you can shift select for different vertex group, but I want to be able to select bones which then highlights the vertex group.
I did find another post indicating that “lock object modes” needs to be unchecked - It is.
I also found a short video saying you need to first select the armature, then the mesh, then enter weight paint mode, but I am still not able to select different vertex groups by bones.
Yeah the new 2.8 is not intuitive at all. But go to object mode. Select your armature, shift select your mesh. Go to weight paint mode. Shift select your bone and it should work.
I hate they introduced another selection method for skinning.
Yea, this is what I have been trying to do and still does not work.
Below is what I get.
The bones remain orange and the only I can select are the verts - which appears to need to be selected in order to weight paint.
OK, so I got it to work, but not exactly the way you mentioned.
here is what I did.
1-select bones and enter Pose mode.
2-go to edit and check mark the ‘lock object nodes’
3-exit pose mode and go back to object mode
4-Keep the armature selected then shift select the mesh
5-then go into weight paint mode.
6-in weight paint mode the bones will appear to be in pose mode, though you can’t actually pose them, but I was able to active vertex groups by selecting the bones.
With this method I do not need to SHIFT select the bone. I can simply pick each bone and the vertex groups would become active.
If I tried to select the armature in object mode then shift select the mesh then enter weight paint without steps 1-3 it did not work. Instead shift select would switch me between the mesh’s weight paint mode and the armature’s object mode.
Oh, and turning off vertex select mode worked too.
Thanks everyone, I just spent an hour trying to find out why I couldn’t select my armature bones in weight paint the usual way ( ObjectMode: Select armature + shift select Mesh ).
Then it turns out , the Toggle select faces was on , (at the usual upper left corner ) .
what a relief…
I’ve been having this problem myself following the auto-weights tutorials, and I’ve finally figured out the problem I was having. Can’t say that the issue is the same for you guys but this is my fix to this problem.
When you go to parent with automatic weights, make ASOLUTELY CERTAIN that your active object is the armature and NOT THE MESH.
I don’t understand what’s happening in the background, but here’s my guess. When you use parenting options in the 3d view, it assumes that you are making everything you have selected as children to the active object. If the mesh is the active object, since the mesh itself doesn’t move without animation, the child armature has no reference to effect its own children. Making sure the armature is the parent of the mesh allows the mesh to to give the parent armature data to affect.
So again, make sure that the armature is the parent of the mesh, and not the other way around.
Solved (at least for me): Once you have selected your Armature then shift selected your mesh and entered weight paint mode, make sure you are NOT in Face or Vert select mode. If you are in either one of these, just click on the icon, like the face select icon, to toggle it OFF. If neither are selected you should now be able to select bones with ‘Ctrl’ + ‘Left Click’.
This is unintuitive, would be great if they added a bone select icon to provide proper feedback.
This works for me, but when I use shift + select, it leaves the last bone selected, and both will be selected, and I have to shift + select the last bone that was selected to unselect it. To just select a new bone and deselect the old bone, you can use CTRL + select. I’m in 2.83.4.
Just signing up to the forum to say that this is one of the most awful headache ive ever gotten from using a software. Love when sometimes, this just works, and sometimes, it just doesn’t for no reason. Cannot ctrl click bones no matter what i do, i follow the same steps EVERY time to parent the mesh to the armature. Absolutetly horrible software design.
