I’ve tried armature with weight painting and mesh deform - my dinosaur will not mesh properly! I’m desperate for help!
Please help me!!! I’m a newb! 
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that dino is amazing
You have a fairly complicated leg rig, especially on the upper thigh. I’d suggest dropping back a step or two and doing a simpler rig to get a feeling for how it moves with single bones in each limb section. By getting it to mesh properly I assume you mean getting it to move without strange deformations. This is the indeed the problem riggers face. It’s not easy.
Start simple, go as far as you can with a simple rig, then slowly add corrections to fix awkward deformations. Test your ideas on simple meshes before you try to incorporated them in your model, to see how (or whether) they work. Expect to throw several attempts away and start over (it’ll happen whether you plan on it or not.)
Good luck.
Thank you! My cousin says it looks fake
OK - I will retry my cage. When you say rig are you referring to my mesh cage or my armature arrangement? Do you by chance know why the vertices explode into that massive bulge when I use mesh deform? I’ve spent days redoing this - I’m wondering if there is a certain shape I’m supposed to maintain when creating cages. I’m trying to make the butt stationary while the thigh moves.
A rig is a setup that you use to deform a mesh. Rigs in Blender can be either bones, or shape keys or deform cages or lattices, and constraints and drivers.
My point is you seem to have a deform cage and an armature set up, and the armature set up is fairly complicated. It’s difficult to give you any particular advice about your rig because it’s hard to figure out what you are intending to do with all that stuff.
If you have never rigged anything before, start simple. Use an armature with bones. Use only one bone per limb segment (shin, thigh, foot, toe, etc.) Actually, I’d really recommend you start with the tutorial Introduction to Character Animation before you start on something of your own.
Orinoco is 110% on the money. In rigging, more is not ipso facto better, and it’s all too easy to over-complicate. KISS (“keep it simple, stupid!” – don’t take it personally, it’s just a handy acronym 
) rules. The time to start adding elaborations is when, and ONLY when, simplicity cannot do the job you need.
One major thing you’ll learn about rigging is that all the parts interact, and the interactions are not always obvious, so the fewer parts you have, the easier it will be to troubleshoot, and the more logical will be any additions you decide to make to enhance the rig’s functionality.
Well with the last two images it’s not just an over complex leg set up that is doing this … You have a lattice or mesh deform modifier on top of your dino mesh ?
Usually this is caused by one or more of your objects having a rotation (usually along the X) in Object Mode … Go into Object Mode and check if this id the case by hitting N to bring up the Transform Properties panel in the 3D window and check the rotations . If you do have a rotation on one or more objects, remove all parenting/modifier relationships and apply the rotation with Ctrl-A, and then reapply the parenting/modifiers and see if that works …
And Orinoco is right about your leg rig being too complex, the arch of bones in the thighs is completely unnecessary … the first three images show this …
If the usual suspects don’t work post a simple blend (like get rid of the textures - pretty though they are :)) …
Thanks everyone! I appreciate it! I had those other bones in the thigh because at first I was using envelopes instead of weight painting. But yes - they are def unnecessary now that I’m not using envelopes. I suppose I’m going to destory my current rig and try it again from scratch.
I did it! - 2 things I was doing wrong: 1) I had the armature modifier applied to the main mesh and the MeshDeform mesh. So it was amplifying the movement of the vertices. 2) The MeshDeform was too close to the skin of the body mesh (i think) - so it was creating a bunch of crazy stuff. My new MeshDeform mesh works perfectly - leg moves smoothly and naturally. Thanks again for the help everyone!
I don’t know what motivates you guys to be generous enough to answer a bunch of people’s questions - but you guys are awesome
It was basically people who were generous with us when we were new. Just passing it forward. :eyebrowlift: