Low poly deform?

i dont know if its just me but does anyone else have problems getting shoulders to deform well on low poly character models. if anyone can give me any detailed pointers or good tutorials that would be great.

Ps. im fine with poly counts of 2000 and above but i want to be able to get it working on low poly models say 1000 polys.

Pete

The most important thing for low poly meshes is the placement of the vertices. The lower the resolution, the more important it gets.

For things like shoulders and elbow/knee joints, try to have more than just a single row of points. That way you can assign different vertices to different bones and avoid some of the pinching effects.

It can also help to have your base pose in a more relaxed pose with the arms in a more relaxed position than the standard cross position that everyone uses. That way the joints do not need to deform as much to get started.

you need more polys around the shoulders.

You might also want to consider vertex weighting.

What Tim said:
Definately vertex weighting, it's only needed for maybe a couple of verts at shoulders, elbows, kneecaps usualy.

And expanding on what Pongo said:
When modeling give some thought to the characters limbs range of movements.

You idealy want the 'rest pose' of the mesh to be a sort of average center of all the animations it will have, so there's the least amount of deformation required from the 'pose' or static position, to the extents of the deformations of each anim cycle.

Consider this a top down view of the rest pose of an arm. (s)houlder, (e)lbow, (h)and

     h
    /
s--e

2 anim poses (or extents they may reach within an animation) might be: straightened

s--e--h

and: fully bent

 h
  \
s--e

The range of movement from rest to either extent is equaly small = minimal deformation

However, if the rest pose was like the straight arm (as in a classic 'T' position many people seem to use), then the range of movement to a fully bent arm would be large (at least 90 degrees) = a lot of deformation at the elbow.

i dont have trouble with small amounts of move ment its just when the character moves his arms up and infront say to hold a pistol so that hes looking down the sight, he gets a bit screwed up at the shoulder. im using cinema 4d which i am unable to export animations from, so i can use pacemaker or character FX to animate my model. i will try modeling in a different pose to see if it helps. thanks for you input.

Pete

This is misguided and wrong. The most important factor in good deforming meshes is the edge flow (edge loops). This determines how and where your pinching will occur.

Pete: Sounds like the arm may be twisting, got screens?

a bit harsh doncha think? I'm not about to get into a pissing match with someone over this, but please use a little more tact in the future.

Edge loops, as you pointed out are important, but if your vertices are misplaced they are not going to fix the problem. With utra low-poly work, you often don't have the leisure of making nice loops, and triangles become more important than the quads you would normally work with in poly modelling. It's all interconnected, not exclusive to one or the other.

Edge looping isn't as important to realtime as you may think. Well, it really depends if you can commit enough polys per model to make edge looping worth it.



Here is a wire (not done by me), which demonstrates really low poly modeling

Also as a note to the original poster. Look at the knees and elbow joints.

That's a pretty decent example for low poly modeling.

You can see exactly where the pivot should be on the knee and elbows, and notice how it splits out to allow for proper deformation without collapsing. The kneecap for example can use the upper points of the knee for the thighbone and the lower ones to the shin bone. When deformed, the knee will remain sharp without collapsing, and can be done without even having to weight the vertices. (Although weighting could help further.)