automatic weights won't connect skeleton to mesh I have a mesh and constructed a skeleton from armatures, single bone &amp; extruding, inside the mesh. I press CTRL+P, I click on "set parent to- with automatic weights". In every tutorial I watched this connects mesh and skeleton like magic, yet in my it does literally nothing.  I move the skeleton in pose mode, nothing, only the bones move.  I only found one person having the same problem as me and the question wasn't answered.

.blend file available here: https://ufile.io/304451 (apologizes for the crappy site).  This is after I used automatic weights.

I also tried with really simple things like a cube scaled to be a door and a single armature. still nothing.
You need to:

Select all you mesh parts
Select your armature while selecting the mesh using Shift+RightClick
Hit Crtl+P then choose With Automatic Weighting

And all will be good as shown below:

As @lemon mentioned, although it will work without joining the mesh parts together, but it's better to join the mesh parts together then apply the parenting to use the dog as one object instead of having many objects representing one object as this will avoid a lot of mess. To join the mesh parts select all mesh parts using Shift+RightClick then hit Ctrl+J