Arms

There are three control points on the arm. They correspond to the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist.

Dragging the wrist control point

Dragging the wrist control point allows you to move the whole arm at once. Just drag the wrist to where you want the character's hand to be, and all other parts of the arm will follow it.

Rotating the wrist control point

Rotating the wrist control point has the same effect as rotating your own wrist joint. You can rotate the wrist along 3 axis. (For how to rotate a joint in general, see our Two ways of posing tutorial.)

Dragging the elbow control point

Dragging the elbow control point allows you to change the position of the elbow while keeping the wrist and shoulder position static. It has a "twisting" effect on the whole arm:

Rotating the elbow control point

Rotating the elbow control point has the same effect as rotating your own elbow joint. You can only rotate the elbow control point along one axis:

Dragging the shoulder control point

Dragging the shoulder control point allows you to move the clavicle along with other parts of the arm. It doesn't have a big range of motion (because the human clavicle doesn't), but can be handy when making some subtle shoulder positions!

Rotating the shoulder control point

Rotating the shoulder control point has the same effect as rotating your own shoulder joint. However, it does not move the clavicle. In real life, you are also engaging your clavicle when making some big movements with your shoulder. Therefore, we recommend first dragging on the wrist control point to get the arm to roughly match the pose you want, because that will also move the clavicle in a natural way together with the shoulder, then use the shoulder control point for any further fine tuning.

Tricky poses involving the arm

Raise arm up

One of the poses many people get wrong is the "raising arm up" pose. A common mistake is to only rotate the shoulder joint upwards:

If you do this, you will end up with a pose like this:

What's wrong about this pose? Notice that there's an unnatural dent between the arm and the clavicle, which will never occur with a realistic human. This is because when you fully raise up your arm, you are also rotating your clavicle upwards. If you do not move your clavicle, your arm can only go up to about 90 degrees. Actually, we coded in the joint limits for the shoulder so that you cannot only move the shoulder to achieve an unnatural raising arm pose in our app. To make a realistic raising arm pose, drag on the wrist control point to move both the shoulder and the clavicle:

Actually, the same mechanism of the shoulder and the clavicle also applies when you swing your arm forward/backward/inward by a great amount. Your clavicle rotates along with your shoulder. If you drag on the wrist joint, our engine automatically adjusts the positions of all the arm bones to give you a natural looking pose.