Smooth Twisting of a 'box'

Support Basics & Interface
1

Yet another how can I …

My lego minifig is looking like this at the moment:
http://araitanga.com/twist.jpg

I have managed to get his arms and legs bending as well as I can (still getting creasing on the inside of the elbow but I can live with that) but when I twist the upper portion of his body I get this sharp bend under the arms.

This is the last row of verticies before the bottom of the body. I have tried adding horizontal and vertical loop cuts and messing with weight painting but I can’t seem to smooth this out.

Is there any advice, either some direction on something I have already tried or a new blender function to try that may correct this or is this just one of those things you get when you twist a box shape?

As an aside if I smooth him (or set autosmooth very high) he ends up with these dark patches that don’t seem to go away with reseting the normals, why is that? (I’ll come clean and admit I have not used the search funtion for this last question!)

2

Could you post a screen shot of you mesh with bones, it will give us a clearer idea of what you doing.

In the gus tutorial ( http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/ch04s07.html ) gives an example of something similare with out your problem (much simlier though

3

As an aside if I smooth him (or set autosmooth very high) he ends up with these dark patches that don’t seem to go away with reseting the normals, why is that? (I’ll come clean and admit I have not used the search funtion for this last question!)

You probably have some interior faces ( a non-manifold mesh ) so blender can’t determine what is inside or outside. Try “select –> non-maifold” from the menu and see what verts are highlighted to help locate the problem. This may help with your joint deformation problem as well.

GreyBeard

4

As requested below are a couple of pictures to help explain the problem(s)

  1. Grey Beard, I did a google on the manifold thing and found a webpage that said that if I tried to decimate a mesh with manifold problems it would come back with an error. Blender is happy to decimate the mesh, so unless the website was refering to an older version of blender I don’t think this is the problem. I have had a think and suspect its just because there are lots of vertices are there and while smoothing it causing shadows to appear where it has rounded him off.
    http://araitanga.com/shadows.jpg

  2. Below is a picture of the wire (I think this is what you are after). All of his parts are seperate (ie: Body, Waist, Arms, Legs and head). Also the body is hollowed out (unsrprisingly, like a lego man body :slight_smile:
    http://araitanga.com/wire.jpg.
    The ‘Shoulder’ bone is the one I am twisting to move the upper body. You can just make it out in the middle of the mess of verticies in the centre of his chest.

I look forward to any ideas or comments.