Struggling with weight painting mode and pose mode on the example file

[Markus Schille]

Using the exercise file “03-super-bendy-chain_START.blend” as a starting point, I am struggling with weight painting on this file. I have “Lock Object Modes” unticked, but if I put the armature into pose mode, I can’t select the mesh or go into weight paint mode.

[Harris Clook]

Oooh, I found myself getting stuck in this too. Sometimes it would work, and other times it wouldn’t. I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you, so I’m hoping someone else will have one myself!

[Markus Schille]

I can select the mesh in the outliner view, so I managed to do the weightpainting, but I can’t switch active object selection in the viewport window. It works fine in the Wrangler tutorial, or if I create a new file from scratch.

[Dwayne Savage]

First, you don’t have to be in pose mode for weight painting to work. Just click armature and then shift+click mesh. 

Second, if you want to do pose mode option then you can shift+alt+left click on mesh to get a list of objects under the mouse cursor. Assuming you’re not using right click select or emulate 3 button mouse. 

Third, if the list doesn’t come up or you are using emulate 3 button mouse or you just don’t want to do the list then the issue could be GPU depth selection which can be turned off by unchecking it in preferences->Viewport->selection 

[Markus Schille]

Thank you. It works when I do as you said: Object mode -> Shift select Mesh – Weight paint Mode.

In my head I thought I needed to activate Pose mode first. I’m not sure where I got that idea from.
When switching to weight paint mode, the armature does seem to switch to Pose mode, so maybe that’s why I got confused?

In a different Blend-file, I am able to switch between objects by holding Ctrl-Alt and leftclicking the armature while weightpainting. Then the armature becomes the active object and shows as being in pose mode. I’m not sure why I can do it in that file, but not in the exercisefile.

[Dwayne Savage]

Ctrl+shift+LMB is the hotkey to select bone in blender 4.x. alt+LMB usually works. In 4.2, you need to be in bone select mode(3) otherwise alt+LMB is used to select vertices/faces(1/2). 

[Author]

Posts