I can get a bone weight painted, but then I switch to another bone to paint it, and the painting I did before it dissappears, but what’s worse is the brush will no long paint. I don’t know what I am doing wrong. Anyone run into this. Also in the Gus tut, you could use the auto skinning feature. Is it easier to do that and then deselect all the vertices you don’t want or is it better to just manually skin?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
2d
Anybody… come on you Blender geniuses!
2d
When you say the painting disappears do you mean that you paint the arm bone, do something else then when you come back to the arm bone all the weight has disappeared? If so, I wonder if you have an armature modifier active?
If this isn’t waht you mean then tell us your actual workflow and what version of Blender you’re using on what OS?
Manual skinning versus auto-skinning versus weight-painting versus envelopes. Sorry, religious discussions aren’t allowed 
In all seriousness - it depends. For something simple like Gus, auto-skinning can be useful but it still needs cleaning up and this can take as long as skinning manually. I use a combination of weight-painting and vertex selection > add to group.
In complicated areas, I select a bone, add a spot of weight-paint then switch to edit mode. The painting creates the vertex group and that group is active when you switch to edit mode. Select verts (loop and box select can speed things up) and ADD to the group. Then tab back to weight-paint mode and repeat for the next bone.
I think it has to do with the armature modifier, but i keep screwing it up. So i went back to the old gus skinning technique. Which, while cumbersome is reliable. I found also if I auto create the vertext groups with the parent -> armature -> create from closest bone is easier than the weight painting.
Becuase I’m a noob I modeled my mesh terrible for easy rigging. Good lesson learned. Fortunately I will still be able to skin em.
BTW I am using 2.42a (latest build) and xp tablet.
Thanks for your response AndyD.
2d
Hmmm… if you check your armature modifier and make sure object field is properly filled (your bone objects name “Armature” in some cases). That would be the only thing I can think of that might make it act that way. Mine would act that way and lock up when not set up properly.
I think this is the problem, although the tutorial is kind of fuzzy on this. How do you do what you just said. I have got basically 6 armature objects (neck/head, right and left arm, right and left leg, and torso). When I go to make them parented and auto skinned, i get all the groups broken down by each bones name. I have set the vertices for the left arm, and wanted to see if it worked but when I move the arm nothing happens on the mesh. SO I checked the modifer stack, and there is a buttom there that make real or something to that effect. SO I click it and it turn into a real modifer. However what is the significance of the apply button. I don’t have to click apply on the subsurf feature for it to work, so is it necessary for me to do that here?
I imagine I have some learning difficulties as the gus tutorial is for blender 2.32 and I’m using 2.42a.
THanks for your help getting this thing skinned is going to be quite an accomplishment for me. Hahaha.
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Use the updated gus tutorial on the blender wiki that should help solve your problems.
You sir, are a immortal among men. Thanks for the link.
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P.s.: I should have known better I got the BSOD tut off of their didn’t even think to check if they had an updated gus tut.
6 armature objects? or one armature object with 6 bones? 6 armature objects could be the problem. Post a screenshot
I got this figured out. Excuse the noobness, I meant 6 bones in one armature. The problem was I was not correctly setting up the modifer.
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Only the weight painting for the selected bone will show, that’s not a bug.