 So you have no idea how to weight paint your character, not a problem. Now this video is going to be a summary of my bigger weight painting series that has all of the details but in this video we will cover all of the most common issues that new 3D artists tend to have the first time they try and weight paint. Now something really useful I recommend you do is you click your rig and on the right under the running man under viewport and display check in front. This will allow you to see your bones through your mesh then change bone type to stick which will make the bones a lot less cluttered now there is an automatic weight paint feature built directly into blender that you can use by clicking your mesh shift clicking the rig control P and with automatic weights and now it's not going to be perfect but it's a pretty good starting point and from this we can manually fix all the details by clicking the rig shift clicking the body go to weight paint mode and on the right under tool down under symmetry make sure that mirror X is checked this will allow us to mirror all of our work from one side to the other automatically now if you hold all in left click you will be able to pick a bone and left click again to start weight painting it but you will notice that this paint doesn't go through the entire object in order to fix this you can go on the right under brush settings and down under advanced turn off front faces only and under fall off change the brush type from sphere to project and now when we left click it will paint through the entire object okay so now personally whenever i see an area that is just flat out wrong i just do a very rough approach with the paint brush settings strength and weight to one and just cover the whole thing red then i go to the bone next to it and do the same thing now something useful to know is that while your weight painting if you press r you will be able to rotate whatever bone you have selected which is really useful when you just want to quickly check the bins and then i go to the top left under weights smooth increase the factor and iterate a few times until you think it starts to look right then click the neighbor smooth click the neighbor smooth click the neighbor smooth and just do that until the problem goes away and literally repeat the process over and over until the bins between every bone looks good let's talk about some common problems that a lot of beginners have the first time they do this for example weird-looking bins that just aren't getting better no matter how smooth they are usually if you are having some problems but everything is smooth that means that you don't have enough edge loops so if you're trying to bend the fingers but your topology looks like this unless you use some serious shape keys and drivers you are not going to get nice looking bends add some edge loops and then try smooth again this will usually fix your fingers your elbows your wrists your knees and your ankles another common problem that beginners have is the natural bins in the pelvis area if your character has smooth weight painting but the bins are still not working then your topology is probably not conducive for good animation for example if your topology looks like this then you are not going to get the nice bins in the pelvis area because the legs are supposed to bend around here not here so double check your topology and make sure that your edge loops are aligned where the joints normally bend another common problem that beginners tend to have is the infamous wrist twist problem and the easiest solution that most professionals use is they simply have twist bones in between the joints for example if you're using the unreal five skeleton like we are then you will see that in between each main limb are two twist bones now you can manually control these if you want but personally i like to automate any repetitive task we already know that the twist bones should only trigger when the wrist turns and they should do so in relation to the distance they are from the wrist so the closest one should be twisting at around 66 of the wrist and the farthest one should be twisting at around 33 of the wrist so if we go to pose mode at a rotation constraint set the target to the rig set the bone to the wrist we wanted to follow the y-axis using the offset legacy and local space for both we just set this first one to 66 the second one to 33 and bam now you can see that every time the wrist twists these rotation constraints will automatically follow it and do their job now if you do all this stuff correctly and you're still having some weird looking deformations there is a last resort you can do to brute force the perfect looking bends this technique requires the use of shape keys and drivers now if you don't know what those are i have a whole tutorial series on shape keys and a whole series on drivers you'll be able to find them in the pinned comment below but that's stuff that i've covered in different videos but something about this video that makes it special is this video is sponsored by Skillshare yes they finally got me too i'm sure you've all heard of them but there's a good reason for that i have dedicated this channel's whole existence to helping people learn the skills they need to build their dreams fast and Skillshare's value really lines up with our own which is why i'm excited to let you guys know how they can help you start reaching your goals today whether you're trying to build a project launch a business or start a freelance career or simply learn how to draw Skillshare is a great place to get step-by-step solutions to figure out what you need but one of my favorite parts about it is it has stackable lessons so that members can learn at their own pace regardless of your skill level it also has a variety of classes and teachers that allow you to find the learning style that really works best for you maybe you're a freelancer looking to build or maintain clients if you are you might want to check out Skillshare's pricing and negotiation class which can help you organize plan create and promote your own personal brand even if you have zero experience it's a new year which means there's a new chance for you to make some real progress on your goals regardless of whether it's improving your professional abilities in your career or even just taking your side hustle to the next level if there's any professional skill you've wanted to learn and you wish there was a free trial that you could just test run say no more the first 500 people to use my link will get one month of Skillshare's services absolutely free so shout out to Skillshare and thank you so much for sponsoring this video now one last thing that i wanted to show you guys which is probably my most important trick is weight paint transfers let's say you've made a character like this one and you have the base body but now you need to weight paint the clothes now most beginners would probably just redo the weight paint from scratch but if you have a base body with the correct weight paint already done you can literally just transfer the weights by clicking the base body shift clicking the clothes go to weight paint mode weight transfer set vertex mapping to nearest face interpolated ray radius to five and source layer to by name you're done now the clothes have the exact same weight as painting on the body and we didn't have to manually fix a thing now of course you can still manually go in and fix things up if you want maybe you want the armor to follow the arm or the hat to follow the head but yeah that's generally how you weight paint hope this tutorial was useful and as always of you the fantastic day and i'll see you around