Character and Narrative: My Struggles With Painting Weights

The next step in my demo character modelling was to paint the weights of the mesh. At first I thought I was going to enjoy this step as on paper it looked quite therapeutic, but never have I been so wrong. I understood how everything worked and that I could replace colours with different values/colours all the way from no influence (black) and 100% influence (white), all of which could be smoothed out with the smoothing brush, but for some reason it just wasn't working for me.

I would start by painting - for example - the finger tips, and I made my way up the hand and arm, painting the influences as I went along, but I found that when I went back to check how everything was looking some of my weights had been reset.

Examples of How The Pinkie Knuckle Had Reset 

(Weights on the Back of the Hand Even Though It Had Been Removed Before)

Example of Wrist Weights Resetting

(Weights on the Back of the Hand Even Though It Had Been Removed Before)

Examples of Other Fingers Having Influence on The Index - Removing These Influences

I really didn't know why this was happening. To begin with, Mat suggested to me to try binding the body mesh to the skeleton again, as something may have gone wrong there. I did this, but to no luck, the weights were still resetting. In the end I had pushed this model to one side as I thought it would be best to focus on modelling my own character. It is only now that I have returned to finish this demo character now that my own is completed. Having had no problems with the weight painting on my own, I'm not sure why this model is any different, but I have the feeling it is to do with how I was painting the influences or how I had the bind set. With my own character I lowered the maximum influences on a joint and this seemed to work fine, but it has also been suggested that because this influence is greater on this model that I will need to smooth out my weights further so that all the vertices have at least SOME influence. It might have been because some vertices had no weight to them that they were assigning themselves weight. 

I decided to not get so worked up over this stage, as I wasn't going to be animating with it, and did the best I could with the weight painting before moving on. I know have knowledge of how to paint weights properly with my own character so I am happy to move on, at least now I know of some problems that I may have to think about in the future.