Articulated Man I: You’ve got your head up your….
Before moving on to the 3/4 view, I thought I should add a few more standard posing elements to the first ‘Articulated Man’.
The standard HM3 elements assume you will be making fairly standard poses: The arms will be at the figure’s side, or perhaps crossed over the chest, maybe slightly bent; the legs will be straight or slightly bent or perhaps you’ll use the ‘crouching legs’. Nothing too out of the ordinary. Once you start bending the limbs to larger angles though, gaps start to show up in the images you’re producing. In particular, you’ll see gaps in the underarms/lats and behind the legs where the buttocks are noticeably absent. For a fully realized pose, those gaps need to be filled. Personally, I’ve taken to using my ‘head’ to take care of these things…..
Here I’ve added three head images to the Articulated Man I pose: two heads are serving as lat muscles (underarm), and (to keep things simple) I’m using one head to serve as a booty. Depending on your illustration needs, you may need to break down and use two heads (one for each buttock), but if your figure is clothed, a single booty object should suffice most of the time….
These elements are not static. They will need to moved, re-angled, and possibly re-sized depending on the position and angle of their adjoining limbs, tilt of hip, or slouch of shoulder. It’s up to you to decide how best to make them work….
Here’s an example of putting the Articulated pose to work:
That’s a pretty vanilla pose, not too exciting, but it’s actually fairly dynamic by comparison to the poses you’ll normally see posted to these forums. I’ve had to stretch, angle, and resize all of the ‘heads’ I’ve added as armpits and booty replacements. You can load the .txt file into HM3 to check out each of the body elements, angles, and positions. You might even want to play around and make your own poses….
tutorial by Sean David Ross
