is there a trick to painting weights?
 

I'm having the hardest time painting weights on my character, even following the rigging low poly man tutorial. His character is broken into pieces, shoulder is separate from elbow, knee is separate from the hip.
My character is all one piece and when I paint weights on the shoulder it messes with the weights I painted on the elbow. They all affect each other and I can't get the weight painting right, I think I'm close and continue on what I'm doing only to find out it's messed it up in some other way.

It's hard to explain, but are there any tutorials on painting weights on a 1 piece character instead of a multiple piece character like in the tutorial I'm following?

oh now when I try to smooth bind my character I get this error "Error: Skin on L_Shoulder was bound at a different pose. Go to the bindPose to attach new skins."

ok figured out the error message.... now a new problem... I knew this was going to be full of problems...

This spot comes up on the chin joint, elbow joint, and shoulder joint. Anytime I try to remove this spot it pops up on one I already erased it from
Left shoulder, erase spot
Left elbow, erase spot
Spot is back in the left shoulder

Hopefully this makes since. I don't know what good the picture will do you but this is the spot that just wont go away

http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/1...ghtsrl7.th.jpg

Yeah painting weights are hard, i am still trying to get the hang of it but its the worst thing i hate about Maya, haha!

"My character is all one piece and when I paint weights on the shoulder it messes with the weights I painted on the elbow. "

Just to make sure, are you selecting the different joints when you are just about to paint the weights on it?

I took care of all of my main problems, thanks for the reply

I selected all the joint and then the body and binded them all, saving the feet for last to attach to the characters shoes which are separate. I'm just now going through the list just painting weights on. It's time consuming, but I must do it.