Your bean is looking good so far. The secret with the connection is getting an understanding of the joints next. The hip joints are in a way easier, because the hip bone is pretty much one big fixed bone, and the thigh bones always start from the same position towards the hip. The problem with the hip is, that there is just a lot more mass around that joint, so you often can't directly observe it, you rather deduce it from your understanding of the bean and the position of the thighs. There are some landmarks for the hip, but which one is visible in which position, and actually accordingly helpful in measurement seems so arbitraty, that I consider catalogueing them a bit of wasted time. I tend to mostly retro-engineer the hip joints from looking at the thighs, and then decide whether the positions I found make sense in regards to the bean. As a result, I vary the shortcuts to indicate the hip quite a bit, dependend on the reference, the exact position of the extremities and the point of view. Sometimes the classical bikini buttom works best, when I try to focus on perspective, I sometimes use one big box, that contains all of the hips and the buttox.
The shoulder joints are a bit more complex. They are at the end of the clavicula/shoulderblade bone, which starts on the center top of the ribcage, and has a bit of mobility itself. What you indicate in your longer sketches as the upper side of the bean is basically formed by this bone and the lair of muscles directly on top of it. Because this bone has a bit of independent movement itself, it slightly deforms the upper half of the torso, and it determines where the shoulder joints can anatomically and plausibly be located. On the up side, the muscle lair here is usually comparably thin, and there isn't much subcutan fat in the area, so you can almost always spot the upper edge of the clavicula, as it protrudes from the neck area, and deduct the possible shoulder positions from it.
The shoulder joint itself is generally contained in rather prominent muscles, but these mostly can be depicted in a rather simple form. Whether that form looks more like a sphere or more box-like or even formed like a tear or a double tear varies a bit dependend on the model's physiology and your own graphical goals, but it is generally too compact to become really hard to visually understand.
So, hip joints, simple construction, but harder to spot, shoulder joints, a bit more complex, but usually easy to observe, once you know, what you are looking for.
In my head, as I progressed to see the shoulder joints as individual objects, I automatically also started to modify the upper half of the bean to reduce it to that typical egg form of the boney ribcage, with the shoulder "apparatus" basically sitting on top of it.
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Polyvios Animations
7 months ago.
