Problem with rigging - Jagged edges when posing

[Macciavelo]

Hello guys and thanks for reading,

I have been having problems with skinning and rigging a character. I have managed to add a biped skeleton to my mesh and use automatic weights for parenting the msh to my armature, but after doing that I added ear bones to my character to be able to bend the ears and move them about. It's two bones per ear.

Problem is, I assigned the mesh to the bones with empty vertex groups and then manually assigned the weights of each mesh for each bone. But now, when I pose the ears, they are deforming badly. It looks like sharp edges are protruding from the ears when I pose the bones just a little bit.

Does anyone know how I can assign vertex weights to bones without having these weird mesh deforms?

(Btw, I assigned the middle part of the mesh of each bone 100 weight and 50 weight to the parts that intersect with each bone. Not sure If I explained myself correctly here, so let me know)

[Pte Jack]

Are you assigning .50 to one bone and .50 to the other at the joint, Do you blend the weights into mesh or just at the verts that make the joint. Like at the elbow, .5 and .5 at the joint mesh then .25 from the upper bone and .75 on the lower arm into the next ring of the mesh of the lower bone, then maybe .15/.85 into the next, etc, so there is transition from one bone into the next past the joint.

[Macciavelo]

Ummm, it's hard to explain, but I'll try,

I'm assigning .25 at the joint to one bone, and to the next verts ring I assign .25 to the other bone. After assigning .25 to each bone at the joint, I'm assinging full weight (1) after the .25
. Hope that makes sense.

EDIT: I have added images of the weight paint to try and make my explanation a bit more clear:

Weight paint of the top ear bone: http://imgur.com/YVwOsI4
Weight paint of the bottom ear bone: http://imgur.com/cBXghka

So each weight paint layer is a single vertex ring loop (except the red one) with different values. To the top ear I added .25 (cyan), .50 (green), .75 (yellow) and 1 to the red part.

Here's how the mesh is deforming after posing the top ear bone: http://imgur.com/ibAi37r
Here's another image taken from another angle of how it's deforming: http://imgur.com/CtKmBnU

I hope that shows what my problem is.

Again, thanks for taking the time helping me with this. I'm kinda new to blender.

[Mailer]

The problem here is that these two bones are weight painted to completely seperate areas of the ear. You would want a transition between the two bones, meaning the bottom bone needs to have at least some paint go into the area of the top-bone, and vice-versa. You want the bones to basically "leak" into their neighbour's area, if that's a good analogy.

I recommend painting the bottom bone so that the weight-strength fades the further up you go through the ear, until you either reach the very tip or close to the end.
You want to do the exact reverse with the top-bone and have it fade the further down the ear you go. This way, there's an intrusion between the two and you will get a smoother effect inbetween the areas and not have the edge inbetween be too visible when you pose it about.

Also, if you want to be *really* safe about this, you can paint the "master-bone" that the ear-bones are connected to to also include the areas of the ears with a strength of around .50
That restricts the mesh from crippling because it's also assigned to the foundation of the closer bones.

[Macciavelo]

Alright, I'll try that. Thanks for the tip!