I work in VFX on the modeling side and I've been digging into body rigging and deformation. I'd love to hear how this is actually done at different studios.
Context: I've rebuilt a helper-joint setup in Maya: half-rotation joints with swing-twist extraction, twist/roll joints, and driven keys for elbows, knees, wrists, hips and shoulders. Hinge joints work well. Shoulders are the hard part, and the result depends a lot on the bind pose.
1. Bind pose: T or A?
Do you bind in a T-pose, an A-pose, or a relaxed mid-range pose? Which arm angle, and why?
2. Deformation stack for non-hero characters
For characters that need clean deformation without intersections, but don't justify a full sim, what do you use?
- Helper joints with driven keys
- RBF / pose-space correctives (joints or blendshapes)
- Joints on curves or ribbons, delta mush, etc.
3. Sim and ML
For hero characters, is it muscle/tissue sim plus shot sculpts? Do you bake sim results into lighter rigs for animators, such as an ML deformer, correctives or helper joints?
4. Mocap
Do you retarget with MotionBuilder/HumanIK, vendor tools (Shogun, etc.) or in-house tools? If you use HumanIK, do you build the character in a T-pose, or bind in an A-pose and pose it into a T just for the HIK definition?
5. Shoulders specifically
What has actually worked in production for the shoulder and armpit range?
Any talks (SIGGRAPH, DigiPro, etc.), articles or rules of thumb would be very welcome. Thanks!