How to mirror bone weights correctly?

[fael097]

I rigged a leg for my character, and the hip parent doesn't have any weight to it, it's handled by its direct child, which is a twist bone, very close to it.

So I selected the "paste blue to green verts" in the mirror mode of the skin modifier, and only after finishing everything I realized the weights had been pasted to the parent bone, not the twist.

 the same happened to knee, shoulder and elbow bones, and now I can't find a way to do fix that except manually.

is there a way to mirror weights of a single bone to another specific bone, without affecting everything else? or perhaps mirror everything else by name, making sure weights aren't mirrored to the wrong bones? or literally anything to do this properly?

[illashiza12]

To mirror bone weights correctly, ensure your mesh and skeleton are symmetrical, then use the "Mirror Weights" function in your 3D software, typically found in the skinning or weight painting tools.

[paulneale]

Not only does the mesh need to be symmetrical visibly but it needs to have the pivot in the center and the XForm must be reset. All bones must be me mirrored, as close to exactly as possible, which is easy when you use the bone mirror tool and type in the X or -X value. Then all bones must have the same volume. For instance if you turn on fins on the left side it will not longer mirror as the bounding box center is in a different place.