Weight Painting

Weight painting is a technique used in Blender to control how much influence a bone has on different parts of a mesh during animation.

To make a mesh follow a rig or armature in Blender, you need to Parent the mesh to the armature.

In a general sense, parenting the mesh to the armature allows the entire mesh to move with the armature, but without specific control over individual areas.

In order to allow for individual areas of a mesh to be directly controlled by the armature, one needs to assign weights, either by Manual Weight painting or by Assigning Automatic weights.

In Blender, weights are used to control how much influence each bone in an armature has on the vertices of a mesh.

They determine which parts of the mesh are deformed by each bone when the armature is posed or animated.

Manual weight painting is often tedious, and often used when assigning weights to more complex rigs. It’s also used to clean up mistakes made with generating automatic weights.

Automatic weights are a great starting point when parenting mesh to armature. They could sometimes need to be tweaked in weight painting mode, but often work well.

Assigning Weights

Select the mesh and then Shift-select the armature object. Open the parenting menu using the right-click context menu or by pressing ‘Ctrl+P.’

Choose 'Armature Deform'. This option has three sub-options; we’ll go with the most commonly used, which is 'With Automatic Weights'.

Automatic vertex groups: After applying 'Parent with Automatic Weights', each bone will have a corresponding group of vertices assigned to it for deformation.

Modifiers tab: An armature modifier will appear, which can be managed like any other modifier in Blender, allowing you to enable or disable it for mesh deformation.