painting weights
 

I am very new to this rigging bussiness and have run into a problem with painting the weights on the lower abdomen. I am having trouble with getting good deformation in this area and am not sure what I should be doing. I am not sure but will the fact that my back root joint and hip joint are both very much in the same area cause problems with this. I have posted a couple of pics showing the problem and would be very appreciative if anyone can let me know how I go about weighting this area.

Many thanks Leon Labyk

quick grab from the front

my only suggestion would be to create more subdivisions in the area in question. other than that, your screencaps look pretty ok.

I have decided to start from scratch and have begun painting the weights again. The problem is when I move my character into a pose and beging painting the weights the geometry in going all over the place and not reacting how it should. Also when I then click on another part of the body and go back to what I had done the weights have changed back but the geometry is still all over the place. I am really starting to hate this whole weighting process and was wondering if there are any simpler packages or plugins out there which are able to do the same thing.

Cheers Leon

My general procedure:
Make two poses on my rig, one an extreme inward pose the character folding in on itself, and an extreme outward pose. I sellect all the operations i have done from the Script editor and make a shelf command to quickly access the poses.
I end up with three buttons, one for the extreme inward, one for the extreme outwards pose and one for my standard bind pose.
There are other ways to do this but this but this works for me.

Select all the bones im going to be skinning, dont include any constraint or end joins in this selection, select the mesh.

Run a smooth skin and set max influences to, leaving remaining settings default, this makes the binding process easier in the long run, not having to worry about taking weight off many joints.

I then modify the skin to have 3 influences at max, doing this after the innitial bind means your verticies are still controlled by one joint but can still have more influences.

When i start to paint weights I lock all the weights on all joints apart from the joints i am currently working on, this means if you use subtractive settings your weighting wont be randomly assigned.

Try and hold/ lock constantly, dont run the risk of ruining your weighting work.