ughhh rigging…not my cup of tea. But I have done some. There are several ways you can do this. I think the most simplest one is to make skin morph targets. Basicly the idea is to have two meshes one in the position A where shoulder is relaxed and second in position B where shoulder is where you want it with clavicle bone in the correct place. Then this is connected in skin morph I believe as a target for the bone. So when ever the bone moves that direction it blends between position A and B. I think you should look up in help about these.
have fun.
Yes of course, i also thought of this solution, and maybe it´ll be the only way for a beginner and no veteran sitting next to me..
well, but what i´ve seen, for example is those interisting rig of maxime, that comes with max.
there the shoulder bone moves up automatically after lifting the arm above a certain amount.
i considered for sure also to use skinmorph tarkgets, but only after the overal skinning is as good as i could acheave it with floating stretchy bones and much finetuning in skinweights.
problem only is, in 5 days there has to be a first 10 secound previewanimation …
there’s four things that you need to do to make this work correctly.
First of all as you mentioned have an auto clavicle that will raise once the arm gets above a certain angle (since most of the time no one bothers animating it as they should). You can do this with either expose transform or using expressions.
Second of all you need to add in a stretchy muscle bone with an end bone that goes from the center of the chest to the front of the shoulder joint to simulate the chest muscle - otherwise you’ll have a load of problems with your skinning and trying to get nice deformations.
Third you need to add another stretchy muscle bone from the middle of the back up to the rear of the shoulder joint in the same way as above to act like the scapula.
Lastly you need a stretchy bone from the side of the neck that points down towards the joint of the shoulder.
You need all these if you are trying to do a particularly realistic character or if your character has a lot of bulk - otherwise you may find problems with the mass of one part of the body going through another.
I should be able to get a small sample scene done up today and get it over to you.
here is a rigg of an axel I did to lern my self with some stretchy muscles etc. not that acurat but anyway an Idea. Hope it can help. for the automatic part; thats not my cup of tea. But I dont think it is that automatic. you can move your arms forward an let the shoulders stay, or even push them backwards. So I have a controle point for the movement of the upper arm joint.
