Low Poly Shoulder Joint Deform Issues Pls Help

Sidikian

I've been struggling with trying to get my shoulders to look good when I move the arm foward from the T-Position and then try to rotate the arm as to turn the palms out and same with moving the arm backwards and rotating the palm out. Here's a few screen shots to show what I mean.





After trying to manually weight paint the vertices to get just the right deforms I still got no where. So I decided to try to retop the whole model to cleen it up and to try to get better shoulder deforms. I found the shoulders from japan thread on these forms http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=46031 and tryed to mimic my shoulders like those. I've tried moving the verts by rotating them around the cursor to act like a joint and not sure I'm going to be able to get great deforms with it either.


Screenshot of retoping my model trying to use bendy straw method:


Any help with figuring out how to weight paint the verts around the 5 loops that make up the bendy straw shoulder, or even figuring out how to do it with my original shoulder would be much appreciated. Maybe I've got my topology crappy?

Either way the shoulder has been holding me up for awhile now and I've searched for solutions and keep failing at getting desired resultes please help me out if you can.

Thanks in advance.

Rob Galanakis

You need to add in at least a twist bone to get good shoulder deformation. If you modeled in the T pose (BAD IDEA!), then that deformation is actually not too bad if you don't have a twist.

Sidikian

Here's a few pictures of my weight painting (it's of the model before my retoping), I know my spine bones probably aren't good enough and I'm debating if I should use a clavical bone.

Note: The large bone in the front of the arm is for bicep movement.

Arm Rig in Object/Pose mode:


Shoulder Bone Highlighted in weightpaint mode:


LowerBone of Upper Arm Highlighted in weight paint mode:


Current BackBone heighlighted in weightpaint mode:


@ Rob thanks for your input. Do you think the method listed by Jorge Rocha at http://kokcito.tk/tut/rig3.html would work out alright?

Edit: Also if T-Position is a bad position to model in, do you recommend the arms downwards some or how?


Thanks again and thanks in advance to any further help. This shoulder issue has been a problem for me for awhile.

Rob Galanakis

Yes, but that is a forearm twist- you will want one of those as well, but this is a shoulder twist, which is not as easy to set up (but just look for tutorials, XSI is good for char setup so I'm sure there are good tuts for it).

You NEED a clavicle bone. What is this, 1998?

I'm not sure what sort of shoulder setup you have there- I'd suggest going through some more tutorials, especially look at some Maya ones since there is the most info for them. I will say that the model, topology-wise, is not bad. Only it should definitely not be in T pose. And the shoulder joint should be further up and a bit out- it is easier to visualize without the arm straight out as well. You'll just need a decent rig setup, and painting weights is the easy part, just nudging stuff till it looks right- at that stage, there isn't really anything you can change anyway.

It will be very useful to go through some anatomy books and rigging/anatomy tutorials, and put your own body through the motions as well, to see better what is going on with shoulder deformation.

EDIT: There was a thread in general discussion about T pose/best modeling pose, you should search for it, it had good info.

Sidikian

I understand about the forearm twist and I had an ok twist with it. As for the clavicle bone, Idk I guess I was trying not to use a ton of bones if I didn't need 2 because the engine I'm gearing the model towards isn't nearly as nice as say unreal's so I wasn't sure how many it can handle.

Poly limit wise the engine from what I can tell is about 5k triangle max for characters if that give you any idea of what the engine is like. It's not that the engine is crap, it's just priced so nearly anyone can be able to buy it.

Either way thanks for your help. I've scearched the web ALOT to try to find good tuts on shoulder deformation and not a lot of luck with finding low poly deforms. Anicent Pig's tut on low poly deformation was about the best I've found, but doesn't talk about proper weighting. I hope I'm not comming off the wrong way I'm just trying to say I've looked around before asking.

Thanks again