Please help me! I have been trying to rig my ginger bread man Gus for at least a month! (I am the world’s worst noob) it isn’t working. He won’t blink. I have tried using the same armature as the body and I have tried a separate one. The eye lids just won’t move. They are there own object not just a part of the body mesh. I just can’t get them to move at all. Also the rest of Gus isn’t working. The weight and distance sliders for the bones worked at first but now have no effect sometimes. What is the deal with that? Also will someone please explain to me how to use the weight painting thingy. The books way of doing this can’t be done. The buttons the book wants you to use are just not there. I think this is because the book is version 2.3 and I am on the current version. This is particularly bothersome on Gus’s legs. They used to move fine but now the backs of his upper leg moves slower than the front. So now the leg looks horrible when I move the bone. This did not happen before. I’ve tried to move the sliders but nothing works. I realize I am hopeless and am asking alot of questions but any help would be great. I have already consulted the book and the wiki pedia online tutorial collection but neither seem to help. Thank you.
If you want to upload your file somewhere (4shared.com is what I use), I’ll take a look at it.
The “Gus” tutorial has been replaced this past summer by the great “Intro to Character Animation” tutorial, by Ryan Dale (see link in my signature).
In the tutorial he explains weight painting, rigging, animation, shape keys, …and oh yeah modelling too 
In the meantime for your eyelids try selecting each of them and parenting “to bone” (presumably) you have seperate bones for each eyelid. The armature has to be in POSE mode for that to work.
Mike
It should be there under gus1.blend I think. And I have separate bones for each eye lid and I have tried parenting them to bones several times it just doesn’t seem to work. I don’t get it. But you will see. Thanks for your help.
Gotcha covered buddy. I pulled your 4 bones together to 2, so he can blink.
You’ll see that I made each set of lids that moved together an object, parent to armature, and choose “name groups”. Then you have to NAME THE BONES AND THE GROUPS THE SAME THING!!! That was your main problem.
To make your original rig work, make all the bones one armature, and all the eye lids one object (use ctrl-j to merge different objects together). Then parent the eyelids to the armature, and choose “Name Groups”. Then make each eyelid a member of it’s respective bone’s group. But most importantly, name your bones!!! You must name your bones. Do that in the bones panel under “Armature Bones”. Then it’ll all be hunky dory.