useful natural pose?

starcow

Is there something like an ideal natural pose for a humanlike character?

A typical T-pose is actually exaggerated in most cases, as the various characters rarely have their arms positioned that high. This only leads to significant distortions in the mesh if they have to be rotated downwards so strongly.
Or what do you mean?

I also wonder how to rotate and position my forearms and wrists so that I can rig as well as possible later.

Maybe someone has a good reference picture?

Cheers, starcow

Neox

take this with a grain of salt as i am no rigger

first of all you should define what your range of motion is, is you character always just running around arms down, holding a machinegun? you can certainly lower your arms a fair bit and angle the ellbows.

for most projects we work on, A pose, not T pose is the go to pose. now low the arms will be, is dependent on the project. some have them higher as others, from my experience haming them very low down can be just as limiting as having them too high up. a good 45° is preferable

what you generally want is your arms and legs to sit on a plane. its okay for the ellbow to be bent or the knees to be bent a bit, same for fingers, but you want the wrist to be in one line with the ellbow and shoulder.

kanga

Yep, good advice from Neox.

The only reason you would want to use a T-pose is to use older motion capture data from a place like CMU. Even then, if you are using a program like motionbuilder to load the files,  your A-posed character is pretty easy to place in a T-pose position to accept the mocap info.

pior

After running into this topic in pretty much every production I've been part of while being on various sides of the art pipeline, my take on this is as follows : 

Regardless how much brainstorming and clever opinions get debated when designing the "perfect tpose" for a project (riggers wanting the bones to be straight and zeroed out, modelers asking for something more relaxed ... and both goups likely ignoring what concept artists have to say, even though they probably know more about human anatony than they do), be ready for it to not be perfect on the first attempt.

Unfortunately the nature of the "lets sculpt everything as highpoly" workflow makes it really quite hard to edit the pose in the middle of a project, especially if someone on the team is dead set on keeping the highs and lows perfectly synced. Yet a badly designed/awkward base pose can have some pretty big consequences - one of which being models and modelsheets looking "uncool" or awkward in that pose, seemingly falling short compared to the intention of the concept. Thus creating a negative bias during art review, especially if non-artists have their say.

I believe that the humble approach is to first and foremost look at models extracted from existing games, as opposed to debating the theorical perfect angle for fingers for days.

starcow

Thanks for all the good advice!

I just came across a video of "FlippedNormals".

This video is about the retopo of a character.

I particularly noticed the position of the arms.

Does that have advantages when rigging to bend the arms and wrists in this way? Or is it just about the interesting look - and the pose would be rather unsuitable for rigging?

Cheers, starcow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuQzPDs99yM

Neox

it looks cool in model stage, thats about it.