That Pesky Elbow/Shoulder!

One real limitation of the Mil Horse is (like other Daz characters) the bend of the elbow. Newer M4 and V4 models have some morph accommodations for elbow bends. Sadly our Mil Horse hasn’t reached that level yet. However there are do’s and don’ts that will give the best possible result.

In real life the anatomy of the horse’s shoulder etc is that the scapula is NOT attached to the horse’s skeleton except by cartilage; so the horse’s shoulder is capable of a huge range of movement independent of the neck, vertebra and ribcage.

So above is our beloved Mil Horse in the default SHOULDER, ELBOW and LEFT FORELEG pose.

Above is what we often see when someone wants the leg “bent” – they have just bent the FORELEG

Pretty awful… So let’s go back to our default pose. To bend the FORELEG, actually start with the ELBOW. Another problem we will see is the ELBOW has a bend limit of +20 or -20. That won’t let our horse do the Spanish Walk 🙁

This shows the ELBOW bent to the full limit. A good start…

So next see how much we can raise/bend the FORELEG without getting that horrid “typical” bend. THEN raise/bend the SHOULDER.

Here we encounter yet another problem. The Mil Horse’s shoulder IS attached to the rest of his body- he can’t really lift it properly/freely. So we’ll do the best we can. Below shows a decent compromise.

Avoid really extreme posing of the shoulder- it just looks strange. If you REALLY want a good looking shoulder that is more extremely posed, you WILL need to do postwork. Or another solution is to have the leg that will be more extremely posed be the leg AWAY from the camera – in this case it would have been better to pose him with the opposite diagonal pairs of legs, so that the RIGHT leg is lifted high, not the left. There will still be problems, but they are much easier to correct in postwork. I did it this way to show more clearly the problems involved.

Here is our Mil Horse executing Spanish Walk after some very quick postwork.

Til next time, happy rendering!
Laurie