Neutral Pose

[geegrafix]

In everyone's opinion, what neutral or bind pose is the best? Arms out to side with palms down? Palms facing forward? Arms down in front of body? I have heard a couple people say different things. Which is best? Anyway to avoid problems in shoulder area? Thanks

[cyphre]

Not everyone is going to agree with me here. It depends on what you are going for really. I tend to model my characters with all the joints at the middle ground of movement. What I mean is that I would model my character with their arms at a 45 degree angle and the forarms at about 90 degree angle. This way your not over stretching the arms when your character goes to move in any direction you want. You will get over stretching if you character puts his arms above his head though. The really bad thing about modeling this way is the rigging part. Bones tend to like being straight, so this might not be the best way for you to do it. All I know is that I have seen the best results in my models when modeling them in this position.

[nazgul]

Down to the side, or slightly out (not quite a 45) is my preference. I base my opinion heavily on these two things:

1) If you want your model to look even slightly respectable you have to accept the fact that you are going to have to weight it; in some areas, point by point. Life sucks, but it's a good paycheck.
2) Favor where the model is going to be MOST of the time. Usually, even in action-adventure video games, the most active of any work you'll do, the arms still stay pretty much at the sides a lot more than they spread-eagle.

You're going to have issues with any decent shoulders and extra rigging of some form or another no matter where or how you build them, it's a matter of choosing the effort you put in. Do you want to rig it up in the less frequent pose, or rig it into the common ones. If you build your character arms-out you can easily run into "posing" and bone placement problems. Most people, even pros, tend to make the model look good from that raised position taking into account (at least artistically) that your shoulders are up, but then not adapting the bones to that fact (when you, as a normal person raise your arms to the side, you are also raising your shoulders, although this is rarely considered in bone placement, and as a result when the arms are dropped they A) look like the shoulders are "shrugged" and the arms are too short )

Arms down or very slightly out to the sides overcome the artistic issues best, as you are building what the audience sees most instead of building, (for example) a screaming face that is going to be viewed in a calm pose most of the time. By being where you'll be most, you're "closer to zero".

Back to point 1), the trying to avoid work, or accepting it; technically, to many people, having the arms dropped seems like it makes the weighting harder which is not really true. When weighting, just animate the arms to the sides to get into the tight spots. Easy stuff.

My three cents.

[badcookie]

I agree with Cyphre. If you take into account the range of motion of the character, find the mid point of every joint, and model it there. This will give you a model that will look good in a large variety of poses. But, as the previous post, if your character is only going to squat once in your entire project, don't comprimise the ease of modeling, setup or the quality of your standing poses just to accomidate that one trick pony.