Can anyone have a look at my file and explain weight painting for animations rigs to me

TheMuffinMan9

Can anyone explain what the best way to understand weight painting a blender rig is? I am trying to rig a pony to obviously work smoothly and move in a caricature way for a pony. But, I am having a hard time figuring out exactly what it is that I need to get the mesh to move like it should. There is always something deforming the mesh into garbage when I try and move its neck, say if it was going to scratch its withers with its teeth. Which would be a big turn around and reach back with its neck. But, my mesh cannot do that. I have not finished it but, I am on my second attempt with it. But, I did post where I am thus far, which is enough that all of the neck bones are painted up along with the head. That is spine 9-16 for anyone who has a look at the file and is going through the vertex groups. In such motions through most courses, his neck will separate, leveling off somewhere like a layer of the vertex group stopped working with the other vertex groups and its head squeezes in and thins out the more that it turns. I tried the xmuscle system add on. But, unlike it is advertised, it does not deflect the skin, which would have been quite handy. If anyone could have a look at my mesh and try and explain this in a manner that is easy to understand I would greatly appreciate it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ixolveqp7lz2ycl/test5.blend?dl=0

Eric Chadwick

Screenshots would be nice, even a youtube or a gif. Screen2Gif is free and super easy to use, then just drag the gif into your reply. 

TheMuffinMan9

So, I received the answer from elsewhere. Animation rigging in Blender requires for an extremely clean topology, a central bone rig system, and overlapping medium weighted weight paint groups. And the head will squeeze when it turns because of unspecified or left out weight groups that need to help turn it that are along with the mesh.

FourtyNights

Animation-friendly and efficient topology to have clean deformations isn't Blender specific. It applies as a general rule in the field of rigging/skinning. Usually a decent start is to get some auomatic weights initially, and then start fine tuning skin weights.