Auto-weights for a single bone

[CaptainExtremis]

Is there any way to select only one bone in an armature and tell Blender to auto-weight paint it, specifically, without doing the "parent whole armature to mesh" option? I ask because I'm afraid it'll ♥♥♥ up the model

(also please forgive me bc I might be spamming the forums for a couple weeks. Blender's new UI is confusing af)

[Stretchyf]

I think no. Because Blender needs all the deforming bones to apply weights - if you have only one bone then algorithm will create one vertex group spanning the entire mesh for that bone only - not what you are expecting probably.

May be "With Envelope Weights" are closer to what you want to do (detaching that one bone beforehand) but you need to specify radius of envelope for the bone's Head and Tail in Edit Mode and it is still would give different result than Automatic Weights.

And you can clear parent (Alt + P -> Clear Parent) for the object but I don't know why do you need that.

If you afraid of losing something then you should just make a backup of your .blend.

[CaptainExtremis]

@stretchyf thanks! I asked because it's been 1-2 years since I last touched Blender, I need to get back into the swing of it.

[Stretchyf]

Good luck then. Blender had a major change with 2.80 release last summer. Not that functional is significantly different though. They removed Game Engine and Blender Internal but added Eevee realtime renderer. Also dependency graph is better now if you are into rigging and animation.