How does everyone weight paint so perfectly?

[Glamd]

It seems like people churn out these movie-quality models as though weight-painting isn't an impossible roadblock. It's either automatic weights with flat pelvis's or vertex weights on low-poly models. The tools there for painting each bone, I just can't possibly imagine using, you can't see which vertices already have ownership while painting a different bone, and there's this forced blurry gradient you have to squint at to tell what's weighted already. Is it just perseverance or is it easier than it seems? How do you find your courage?

[NovaDorium]

well I am in no way one of these masters you are talking about, but for setting up rigs for animation I have always done everything I can to avoid weight painting, I will use envelopes on the bones that you can adjust in size and shape quite easily to get the bulk of the way done, and when i need more precise detail in the rig, I just add another bone. Once everything seems comfortable enough, I can start setting constraints on all the "auxiliary" bones I added, things like the waist and around the shoulders, if i'm feeling adventurous i may even have bones for large muscles that need to move in a fun way, at the end of the process i usually have something pretty presentable and I didn't have to touch the vertex weights at all, (only on very rare occasion). So i guess my whole secret is add lots of bones to everything you think needs to move in a slightly more complex way than the default setup allows