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So I saw a pretty good rig the other day of an egg shaped character, but what caught my interest was that when you move the arms around the body (from the shoulder), it seemed that the arms where attached using a boolean modifier, so you could have the arms move to the front of the character and the mesh still looked great. I don't have access to this rig and it was made using maya (I think) but I wanna try making the arms effect on blender on another round shaped character. I tried using booleans but it always created some artifacts, that makes me think that the original rig wasn't made using booleans. Any ideas how to recreate this?

Here goes an image of how the arms moved. Even when moved, the arms still looked like they are coming out of the body, not like it was just another object. Example draw And here is the model that I want to use to recreate that effect. enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ The tricky part would be if you wanted the arm not to leave a crease like kirby's arms leave when they intersect with his body. In that case, I'm not sure why booleans aren't working for you. Can you post images of the artifacts in that case? $\endgroup$ – ZargulTheWizard Jan 20 at 4:05
  • $\begingroup$ Sure. By artifacts I mean I get some bad shading where the parts intersect each other. imgur.com/a/QB4OpBt $\endgroup$ – Juan Jan 20 at 19:01
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For Cycles, a trick would be to use a distinct mesh for the arm and use the Bevel node. It will create the illusion of bevel where the meshes are joining, so you'll be able to move the arms however you want and they will still be looking like they are part of the body. Keep the Radius value low (here 0.1).

enter image description here

enter image description here

In Eevee (or Cycles) you could try with a large topology around the arm joint so that it has latitude to move. Give it a Shrinkwrap modifier with a sphere as Target so that it stays spherical:

enter image description here

enter image description here

Or you could use the arm as a distinct object and try the Shrinkwrap modifier, with the Wrap Method > Surface and with a group assigned where the arm is supposed to stick, but it looks hard to get good result:

enter image description here

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Wow, this seems useful! the bevel trick seems like my answer, I want to animate the character so I dont want to join them by making them a single object, it would not look good. $\endgroup$ – Juan Jan 20 at 19:04
  • $\begingroup$ By the way, care to explain why the bevel method works? just like to know what is going on there. $\endgroup$ – Juan Jan 20 at 19:17
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    $\begingroup$ It's just a visual trick, the meshes are not affected, I don't know more actually ;) $\endgroup$ – moonboots Jan 20 at 19:20

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