I have been reading amny posts where people complain about the inability of Poser figures to do the hands above head pose properly. So I have decided to share some advice for the people who are currently making new human figures. First, I need you to do an experiment. Don't worry, it doesn't involve anal probes or taking any untested drugs, lol.

ROFL! I'm so glad i'm not the only one that will pose in front of a mirror to get an idea of what my poses should look like in poser!!!

Not an absolute. I can raise my arms, palms down until by Biceps hit my ears. Condition and individual bone structure comes into play (and no I am not double jointed.) When I stand with Palms down, one Elbow points to the back on one arm, and on the other it points more towards the ground as in the last image.

I am sorry, I am sure that if we did a collection we could get some doctor with a kind heart to do some medical prodedures, and then you can stop being a mutant and blend in with society, lol. My point is just that people are complaining that Poser figures can't do certain things, but in real life people can't do those things either. For instance, try as my girlfriend might, she can't get her boobs to get bigger, no matter how many dials she turns. :-)

Not only that,,, There is NO side to side on forearms, shins or finger digits(beyond on the 1st). Nor is there twist on fingers beyond a few degrees. And only under pressure. I wish there were not even available as dials. Poses would improve greatly...

I'm a rather unfit, not extremely exceptionally flexible female and I can raise my arms until palms hit above my head. Full extent of the move (I can feel the BURN) ends after arms pass each other and form an X with left hand on right side, right hand on left side.

Exactly. There are dials on Poser figures that should be hidden, or controlled by ERC. I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't bend the last digit on my fingers (the tip) without bending the second, so the last digit should just be controlled by ERC from the second digit.

And before anyone suggests a spine with multiple joints, bend your back and see exactly in how many places you can bend it.

I have been working on my own characers for about a year now, and have done hundreds of rigging experiments, and while I have solved some problems, like the knees, others like the shoulders are still not exactly right.

Message edited on: 03/30/2006 18:37

This is so strange. I have had about ten of my friends standing in front of me doing all sorts of wierd poses, and none of them could raise their arms more than about 15 degrees above shoulder level while their arms were straight and palms pointing down, but in the first ten minutes here are two people who can do this. Odd.

People tend to forget that raising your arms isn't just a matter of rotating that ball-socket joint at the scapula. After that initial rotation, guess what comes into play? You can do it! The clavical and scapula bones. There's that large muscle to either side of your neck which facilitates movement of the collar/scapula bones. It is the Trapezius muscle. This is what allows you to raise your hands above your head. Although using a mirror (or photographs) is a good way to see how a body really poses, you should also have anatomic references ("Human Anatomy for Artists" is highly recommended) to see what bones, muscles, and tendons are involved.

Turn on limits :) That will make it so you can't do the things that you can do (like side to side forearms etc)

Quote - if you are female, you will see that your elbow can bend between 5 and 10 degrees the other way.

I'm a girl and my elbows don't bend "backwards".

Quote - no male can bend his arm at this angle

Well, that's not entirely true either. I'm a nurse and have inserted many IVs and I've seen some men able to bend their elbow "backwards" like that. Granted they weren't the muscle bound type with huge biceps that would prevent it. I don't really think that one can really distinctly separte how limber or "bendable" a person's joints are based on their gender, other than their pelvic bones that is. There is a distinct difference in the size and shape of a woman's pelvic bone due to the fact that they have the physical ability to bear children and their pelvic bone needs to adjust and expand.

The elbow bend is a bone issue, not a bicep issue. The female elbow has a larger ridge on the tibia than the male. The female shoulder blades, sternum, jaw and pelvis are very different to the male. I am not saying there are not exceptions, what this whole thread is about is not what individuals can or cannot do, but what Poser models can or cannot do, and what they can't do is bend like people. And the reason for this is that we are basing all the new figures on the ideas we get from the old figures, instead of looking outside Poser at other programs, rigging systems, real humans and human anatomy, and trying to find better ways of doing things, so that we don't have spaghetti knees and elbows, and shoulders that look like blobs in certain poses.

Well since we're debunking the rest of this, ", but I can't bend the last digit on my fingers (the tip) without bending the second" I can do that acctually. But I can also bend my pinkies back (forcing them of course) to touch the back of my palms with out breaking them. I guess someone turned off limits for me.

Remember, that some of the options in Poser are to allow you to achieve natural LOOKING poses, without distorting the Mesh. I mentioned this elsewhere, but I use the Twists to split up a extreme twist in the forearm for a pose by adding some to the upper arm. I do this to avoiding distorting the Texture or Mesh too much by the extreme Pose. Until machines can handle Dynamics that achieve realistic flesh movement, we will need to tweak poses to keep from distorting the Mesh.

Really a figure should be posed at first with Limits set to on. Usually that stops finger twists and that sort of thing. Then turn off limits to tweak the pose. However, I'm very satisfied with not creating realistic figures to begin with as to not cage my creativity. ;) Though I do understand and agree with the gist of your argument.

Good points, Helgard. Actually, standing before a mirror and trying out a pose is what I do when I can't figure out how to get a certain pose looking "right". I'm male, but a rather flexible instance of the type, and it usually helps, even when doing a female ballet-like pose. So this talk about the structure and limits of human musculature and bones is not only useful for character developers, it's also useful for us plain end users who want to get some realistic looking poses out of our existing characters.

Better rigging is only part of the problem. People also need to learn how to pose their figures properly. V2 and V3 can get somewhat natural-looking "arms above head" poses if enough twist and front-back is used on the collars and shoulders. They can do this even better with liberal amounts of joint tweaking.

This is so strange. I have had about ten of my friends standing in front of me doing all sorts of wierd poses, and none of them could raise their arms more than about 15 degrees above shoulder level while their arms were straight and palms pointing down, but in the first ten minutes here are two people who can do this. Odd. I can do it as well, and no one would ever mistake me for being limber. I'd suggest that if they can't raise there arms higher than that, they have problems. I don't see how someone couldn't do it unless they had no turning ability in their wrists.

Just tried it myself. Easily 45 degrees, keeping my arms straight and palms down.

Helgard i hate to say this but i can bend my arms up too and i'm a 44 year old stiffy :o).....Steve

I can't get my arms more than about 15 (edited: just tried, it's more like 25) degree above horizontal with the palms down. I always assumed that this is so for everybody. As a figure creator, I find it very interesting that there seem to be at least some exceptions.
A question for the people that can raise the arm higher in this position: If you reach straight upward in the manner you do normally and dont twist the wrist, do your palm face forward or sideward? Can you turn them sideward without twisting the wrist?

Message edited on: 03/31/2006 03:36

Its easier to do with palm forward, but i can get the back of the hands to touch with them facing sidways but not totally flat (maybe 20 degrees out), yes i can turn them without turning the wrist......Steve

"I am not saying there are not exceptions, what this whole thread is about is not what individuals can or cannot do, but what Poser models can or cannot do, and what they can't do is bend like people." This is not a poser only problem... every character creator/user faces the same sort of problems in even the most high end apps. Human motion and musculature is a tricky thing and it is only recently that technology is making advances in properly simulating it. They really need to incorporate some of this in Poser's rigging system before you will get really decent looking deformations and posing. Take something like rotating your hand/wrist... currently not a single poser figure can do this motion properly. In reality the wrist doesnt just rotate your forearm around its axis. Instead the bones in the forearm actually twist together and cross each other, producing a very characteristic deformation of the skin that no figure i have seen does properly. And this is an example of a very basic motion, forget anything complex like muscle contraction/expansion, skin sliding, tendon movement, inter-skin collision, object-skin collision, skin color changes etc... Here's a simple thing anyone can try to see just how far short of 'reality' our attempts really are: Turn a hand palm downwards, study the back of the hand and clench/unclench your hand. In that little area, you will see so much variety of skin motion, that poser (and most other 3d apps to be fair) dont even simulate 1/10th of it. See how the skin slides around and over the knuckles, losing color as it expands and becoming darker where it bunches up. See how the tendons slide around under the skin like fat little cables. Notice how the muscles expand and contract, how the webbing folds and unfolds. Or how the skin in the fingers pushes against itself and the palm when you make a fist...

Palms outward, I can feel the strain developing in my shoulders when I raise my arms. It's easier to turn the palms inward. And one problem with Poser is that something like twisting your wrist produces skin shifts all the way up to your elbow. Some of the extra bones in Poser are there to deal with skin and muscle, not skeleton. I've seen examples of rigging for other programs which use extra bones which are not part of the normal skeletal chain, and moved by ERC-like methods. You have a buttock, sticking out at the back, but the thighbone is still connected to the hipbone. Unfortunately, the way Poser handles mesh groups I think you might have to do some strange things to make this work. Maybe something like a body-handle? Isn't there some figure which uses that for the breasts?

That fits with my own experience: A twist of about 20 degrees is sufficient, but I cant do it (in real live) without at least some movements in the directions called twist and front-back in Poser. I also find it easier to rig figures to do that kind of motion, than to try to get above 20 degrees just with up-down.

though mobility problems have grown in recent years, I have hypermobility where joints can be bent against the usual direction by a certain degree. Though I'm over 50 my fingers can be bent over 90 deg backwards in angle against the hand. My surgeon says it's unusual but not life threatening (unless you're heavily into dislocating joints lol)

It looks like the mutants numbers are increasing. Like yourself I have hypermobility syndrome. There are exceptions to the rule! As myself and many others have it, I feel that poser characters should as well, in order to replicate the diversity of humans. :-) Along with the above mentioned, I can turn my legs so that my knees bend toward the front without dislocation. (an interesting yet useless party trick) However in relation to post 3 above. If you can lift your arms above this point, observe that the joint begins rotation along another axis. Generally the clavicle and scapula take over rotation and also add a small amount of translation at this point. It would be a hard thing to raise the arms above this point without using the shoulder girdle. Helena

Bear in mind also that what you can bend using your muscles, and what you can ACTUALLY bend, are two different things. You can push your fingers backwards further than you bend them just by willpower.

Message edited on: 03/31/2006 16:04

Also keep in mind that in traditional art, artists cheat like bastards on their figure posing. And in digital art a lot of artists are doing pics of fantasy type people who, compared to folks in the real world, would be flexible like athletes rather than stiff computer jockeys. Dynamic lines are a big deal in the final piece of art - you really do have to twist the crap out of poser figures to stop them looking too stiff and doll-like. Good thread though - you'd definately have to have a bone set-up that at the very least mirrored the number of moving bones in the human body and the angle and placement of the joints on the end. Cheers

Part of the problem is that Poser's rig system is antiquated by today's standards. Look at any rigging system built into full featured 3D programs (usually the built in stuff is looked at as barely passable) and you'll see how far Poser has to go in terms of rigging and character manipulation. That's not even going into stand alone rigging tools like MotionBuilder or plug-ins like The Setup Machine. I love Poser, I think it has a lot of untapped potential but if it's to try to compete in the future, it's going to have to worry less about rendering and worry more about it's core feature : character set-up and animation. As it is right now, the content creators are doing the best they can with what they're given.

Message edited on: 04/01/2006 08:22

[** Nance envisions thousands of Rosity members across the planet reading this all with arms raised**] I suspect that Helgard is actually indicating is that, in reality, it cannot be raised higher with only the human equivalent of the Collar UP/DOWN dial, and that to continue higher, as some folks are doing, it requires both an additional Collar TWIST, and a counteracting Forearm TWIST to keep the palm facing "down". Is that how you humans are achieving the full overhead pose? At some point does your armpit not stop facing out (+/- X), and twist around to forward {+Z) ? Try it without doing that TWIST and I think you'll experience the collar's anatomical UP/DOWN limits that he's observing.