Hi; what can you suggest to avoid the cracks, or bad straightening of critical bending model's part (arms, legs), when animating them with bones? I have problems with rotating the arm of my model from t-stance to relaxed position; in the first case, the shoulder looks right, but when I rotate it downnwards, it looks too straight, and inevitably the lower part of it intrudes within the shoulder.

Ermm... This is tough to answer without a visual representation. Make sure that there are some -excess- (for lack of a better term) polies, and try to make the polies flow more naturally (rounded, and circular, instead of triangulated).

Maybe you should try to check out these video tutorials on character creation.

www.poopinmymouth.com

the bad deformations near the joint is due to a lack of vertices in the deformation area
if your modeler has something close to a knife tool, just use this near the joint

excess? I already reached 2020 polys; if I'll add some more, had had I surely grown over the allowed polycount for most engines?

(sorry for the translation; hope it is clear anyway)

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Original post by Marclandi excess? I already reached 2020 polys; if I'll add some more, had had I surely grown over the allowed polycount for most engines?

You should be OK for the poly count. Most modern engines and definitly upcoming engines can handle poly counts of 5,000 per character without a problem. Unreal3, albeit that it won't be released until 2006 supports 10,000 per character on a geforce 6800. I'm guessing this years engines should be seeing poly counts of between 6-7k.

Getting a good deformation is an imperfect art. Its a combination of the position of the bones, the weights set on the vertices of the model, the distribution and amount of polygons around the joint, and (sometimes) the addition of "counter" bones. By adding a sibling to a bone joint, you can use this extra bone to tweak or counter-oppose the bend caused by the main bones.

Some programs will also let you alter the function of the deformation or even have different types of bones. A "Smart Bone" in Cinema4d causes bones that haven't been attached to be auto attached. This often causes problems in bones suddenly effecting more than what you expected.

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You should be OK for the poly count. Most modern engines and definitly upcoming engines can handle poly counts of 5,000 per character without a problem. Unreal3, albeit that it won't be released until 2006 supports 10,000 per character on a geforce 6800. I'm guessing this years engines should be seeing poly counts of between 6-7k.

The fact is that I don't own a top-notch engine (which single user could afford their costs?); I'm trying to build a "practice game" using for 3d game studio (I tried Torque, previously, but it is infinitely much more complex and harder that the former)... which deals with an "optimum" of 2000 polys x character.