Natural Pose

Quality Guideline: Natural Pose

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Possible Assessments

Approvable	Title	Description
	None	At least some of these poses need work to look more natural and balanced, either due to not enough joints being posed, or those joints being posed in ways that are unnatural-looking or "broken".
	None	Your poses look natural, balanced, and not overly stiff. Lovely! :)

General Guidelines

A natural stance is one of the most important aspects of posing. It makes your sim look much more realistic and makes your work that much more appealing to downloaders! Most poses should look like they could be done by a real person (or animal, for pet poses), within the range of human motion. While making poses, it's good to keep a few basic principles in mind:

Use lots of joints

Most natural-looking poses will use about 90% of the body's joints, each one rotated or bent a small amount, working together to achieve the pose you want. If that seems like too much, try reaching to touch your own ear using only your elbow, without letting any other joint move or rotate. For most people this is impossible. To complete just this small motion requires moving the shoulder blade, the shoulder, the elbow, the hand and the fingers!

Keep it anatomically possible

Most poses should look like they could be done by a real person (or animal, for pet poses), within the range of human motion. Of course, poses not meant to be a normal human range (for acrobats or monsters) are fine. But in general, most poses should be achieved by bending and/or rotating the joints in a way that's possible (or at least plausible) for the average human.

On this note, avoid stretching out the bones by lengthening or shortening them. After all, if it would be impossible or painful for a real person, it probably won't look natural for a sim pose.

Note: This doesn't necessarily count for alien-like poses. For height difference poses, make sure that this is done realistically, without making anyone 4 metres tall.

Balance matters

Poses should have a believable center of gravity, your sim/pet shouldn't look like they're about to fall over (unless it's meant to be a pose in motion or falling, of course). When creating poses like balancing, a good thing to keep in mind is that the torso should be centered above the foot that's bearing weight. This is the same for walking, running and standing poses.

Avoid broken or distorted joints

Keep in mind that for some poses, while a real body may be able to do it, it may look really bad on a sim. If the body gets badly distorted in a certain pose, try to work around to use other joints on the sim's skeleton or try something else. When rotating a sim's limb, make sure that, for example, the shoulders don't look all knotted or like they're barely holding onto the sim's body!

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Examples

Only base joints used

The pose is still a bit stiff and most joints are left untouched. To really make the pose unique and realistic, we would have to at least try to use the hands/fingers joints, the knees, the elbows, the 2 other back bones and the facial joints.

Many joints used

Most, maybe even all joints are used in this pose! Not only are they all bent and/or rotated without being stretched or distorted, the overall effect is realistic and not too stiff.

Anatomically impossible

First let's take a look at the most obvious impossible rotation bits, which would be the shoulder that's raised over the sim's head.

While the pose has a great base, the shoulder has a rotation that is simply impossible and quite painful looking. To fix issues like this, often it's better to utilize more joints but rotate/bend each one at a less extreme angle.

The torso is also bent to a way that would break one's back if it were to rotate like that in real life. So using the 2 remaining back joints can really help with this! :)

Anatomically Possible

This pose really shows a realism that is within a normal human range! The shoulder is bent to a specific way that doesn't seem as twisted, the torso is realistically bent enough as is the rest of the overall pose!

Tipping over

This sim looks about to topple over, mainly because of where the leg is positioned (the one they're standing on), and how her torso is bending more to our left. When making one of these poses, the sim's centre of gravity should usually be more or less directly above their supporting foot.

Balanced

The sim is standing steady and even though she's balancing on one leg, she doesn't look like she's struggling!

Tutorials - General (All games)

Help! My poses keep looking weird :(

Been working hard but things still don't look right? Reference images and videos are your friend! If you need references to help you create more natural-looking work, modeling pictures are an excellent resource. Models are trained to stand in a way that looks elegant without being unnaturally stiff, which will help you learn how to incorporate a more relaxed feel into your poses.

Also remember to check your poses from multiple angles and points of view. It's quite possible to create a pose that looks beautiful from one angle, but bizarre from any other angle. While such poses may be suitable for your personal use, in general downloaders expect poses to be usable from multiple angles.

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