Please follow the link in order to read my question.
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Animation and Rigging”
For anyone curious, the link isn’t anything nefarious, it’s a screenshot of problematic should deformation with the following text:
Shoulders are notoriously difficult to get right in rigs. I’d first suggest having a look at the weight painting for the bones in the area… try to smooth the edges and allow for overlaps. You can actually paint weights while your character is posed, so that should help quite a bit. Eventually, though, you may need to resort to using a corrective shape key to fix anything that weight painting alone cannot address. Then you can either animate that shape key manually, or drive it with the rotation or location of another bone.
I’d first check anatomy. There is always movement of clavicle and scapula involved, when ever upper arm is raised above shoulder level. Also, shoulder joint location seems be way of.
Anyway, I’d first test / learn how skinning works, as weighted skinning seems to be new subject to you.
Take a cylinder, experiment how 90 degree bend and 45-180 degrees twist work on cylinder or subdivided box.
This is something many folks seem to skip, and expect something from mixing of 2-4 transforms that it can’t do.
Simple 3d bone vs human bone setup never works further than simple game character even if properly done and resorting to exotic non t-pose poses or limiting range of movement to sustain illusion of “good quality” deformation.
For example twist movements, and extreme poses and such are something that will never work on basic skeleton, when applied to semi realistic or realistic anatomy character. Try any mixamo auto skinned character and you see they fail miserably on extreme poses.
I’d second what @Fweeb said. Either that (shape keys) or some driven bones on areas that need correction where skeleton bone transforms are not enough.
Learning how to rig for good deformation of semi/realistic characters can take years or minimum of months IMHO.