Re: Best practices for posing character models...

punchface

Ladies and gents,

I have neither the time in my life nor the desire to be a rigger or animator. Given this, what do you all think would be the "best practice" for taking a character model out of its "T-pose" and putting it (from fingers etc. on up) in other more interesting and portfolio-worthy poses?

I'm not afraid of getting my feet wet messing around with biped or bone systems but I don't want to spend a million years digging around in the niggling intricacies of it all unless absolutely necessary.

respect,

pf

SuperFranky

Biped in 3ds Max looks like a simple enough solution to me. Or you can use Transpose Tool in Zbrush to pose your character.

oglu

the human ik rig is also a good solution to get something to pose...

chronic

My method is to make a basic skeleton for a character and bind with default weighting. then I set a keyframe for the joints in bind-pose, and a keyframe in my desired pose. moving back and forth between these two positions I can smooth and fine tune the skin weights to make things look good for the single pose without worrying about whether it would be good for animation.

-I take care with joint placement as that can have a big impact on how natural a character looks posed
-I don't make any controls (just rotate the joints) except in certain circumstances where simple leg ik's can help posing (don't forget to keyframe the ik's too)

punchface

Thanks, y'all!