Help with Blender

[Sophia Trefusis]

Well Ive managed to rig and texture and even upload some skirts to SL. But what I would really like is finding a good tutorial on weight painting.

Ive tried to learn how by googling for information about weight paint and then apply it to my skirt ....but all it makes is either make my skirts go all wobbly or barely be affected. :/

Another thing,Is there an easy way to mirror a sleeve so it appears exactly the same on the other arm?

Really happy for any help you care too give :)

[hibit Spad]

In the Second life wiki page on Blender is a list of some very good tutorials sites.  A few of the sites are SL specific.

 

 http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Blender

 

 

[Ivanova Shostakovich]

Here is a very good series of Blender mesh and rigging tutorials made by one person. I found them very detailed and helpful.

[Drago Artful]

If you want to mirror the weights on your sleeves, while in weight painting mode go to the tool shelf (T to toggle), go down to options and choose x-mirror. Now when you change the weights on one sleeve, the other sleeve should change along with it.

Or if you meant for modeling so the model is perfectly symmetrical, then add the mirror modifier. Just cut your model in half and make sure the origin is in the middle.

Not too sure what to tell you about your weight painting troubles. There are some youtube videos that should give you an idea on how to go about it. A tip: as you're weight painting, rotate the bone you're working on around. You should be able to get an idea on how much weight you need and where to paint it. Hit Alt+R to undo the rotation on the bone.
You can get weights automatically made by selecting your model, then hold Shift and select the armature, and hit Ctrl+P. From the menu choose armature deform with automatic weights. Great if you want results quick, but it's never perfect. You can always fix the weights from here, of course. Also, you might want to try the Copy Bone Weight add-on from machinimatrix.  The website supplies you the avatar.blend file from which you can copy the weights from.

[Sophia Trefusis]

Thank you I will look into that tutorial.

I know about bone weighting for rigging and just the other day discovered the "cloth" modifier

Trying to make an 18th century skirt (not so good with whole mesh outfits,so mixing mesh and textures) and I want it to move in a credible way instead of just looking like a box around my waist.

Someone mentioned body weight painting manually to get it right but I have also seen some mentiones of assigning vertex groups.

 

Its a tricky buisness this mesh.....