yeah it sounds like you need to work on the skinning. you may need to hand weight vertices. Or maybe one of your envelopes is way too big. you can turn on the show all envelopes check box in the skin modifier to see all the envelopes at once. That can be usefull when trying to find a problem.

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I tried changing the envelopes, which resulted in no success. I removed the solvers, and tried just rotating the bones, but it still moves unwanted parts. On some of these parts I am also using the symmetry/mirror modifires. Would that affect them?

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Backing up some, while looking at the envelopes, I did find that some unwanted vertices were selected. Making the envelope smaller did not help. Is there a way to deselect them out of the envelope or take their weight value down? I tried changing the absolute weight of the vertexes to 0, but it just keeps changing back to 1.

I did submit an image/screenshot of my problem, although I am not sure how that works, because now I cant seem to view it.

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the skin modifier has a default setting called weight all vertices. which is handy in most cases because it usually means vertices will be weighted to the nearest bone and you don't get some verts staying put because they dont fall under the influence of any bones. however that setting can cause some verts to get weighted automatically to the wrong bones. thats why you often need to hand weight vertices. For a serious skinning job I nearly always reduce my envelopes to zero and turn off weight all vertices then go in and hand weight and paint vertex weights. You could try using envelopes with weight all verts turned off. it might solve your problem and save you from the tedious task of hand weighting.
and regarding keeping the symmetry modifier in the stack, I'd definitely collapse the stack and do a reset xform on the mesh before starting any kind of rigging. having a messed up transform will cause you untold pain and misery. You can find the reset xform utility in the utilities tab top right.

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I can see where the default setting messed me up. Because I only wanted to animate one limb, I didn't put bones in the other and it might have grabbed vertices for that reason.

How do I turn off verts? Can't seem to find it under the skin modifier. I set my envelopes all to radius of 0. So after getting my vertices all gone, I cant start painting and get this figured out...excited.

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yeah you kind of need to consider the whole mesh. if you only want to animate one limb you should probably have one large bone for the rest of it with the arm linked to it. then the weights can blend to something if you get my drift.

the setting 'weight all vertices" is under advanced parameters in the skin modifier.

Advice on weighting vertices. check the select vertices checkbox at the top, underneath edit envelopes. then use the weight tool (the little wrench icon) under weight properties. select groups of vertices and then enter a weight value preset for them in the weight tool. select the bone you want to enter a weight for then hit one of the preset buttons. then you can see in a list all the bones affecting those verts and their different weight values.

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Thanks alot, I am pretty sure I have it all sorted out. As soon as I turned off weight all verts and started playing with the envelops, it started to come out great. Thanks again.

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