Articulated Man I
As many of you will know, I’ve been teaching myself how to create more dynamic poses in HM3. None of the experiments are perfect, but I think they’ve been turning out fairly well and others seem to appreciate them as well. Lately, people have asked me to create poses for them or provide instructions on how to make particular poses so I thought I might start to share some posing figures as a sort of reference for people to start making their own poses. This first one is pretty basic but it introduces some concepts that are helpful later:
This image consists of 5 parts: A head (my preferred one for posing); a chest; a full torso; the torso is masked to a background shape (a circle); and a lower abdomen/hips. Usually I would set the line colour of the background shape to fully transparent, but for illustrative purposes I’ve left it visible.
This is a basic starter set for making more dynamic poses. Things to notice about this image: the chest/shoulders are tilted down to left at about a 4 degree angle, while the hips are tilted in the opposite direction and the head is also place at a slight angle. Rather than having a ram-rod, stiff figure, this already sets your character apart by being a bit more life-like: in general, people don’t stand at rigid attention, they shift their weight over one hip or the other, and tilt their shoulders in the opposite direction to help maintain balance. The limbs when they are added in will be adjusted to further aid the trunks’ balance while also accomplishing their own goals.
tutorial by Sean David Ross
