I am very new to blender but have 3d modeling experience from other software's and have been playing with the bone rigging and armature stuff in blender. I modeled this character and assumed for weighting I should join all the meshes belonging to the character together, so I selected everything and join with ctrl + j.
I rigged my bones and have the relationships all setup properly, so when I move the bones individually, everything works fine.
As soon as I try to tell blender to join the bones to the mesh, this is where things seem to go awry. I shift click the character mesh + bones, go to pose mode, select all the bones, and ctrl + p and select "with automatic weights. It seems to work great but when moving the bones, the arms and legs meshed get distorted unequally when the symmetric bones are moved the same amount.
I have checked weight paint and everything seems ok, what is going wrong and how do I fix this!