JoyBoxx88

Useful titbits: Under "View" on the righthand side, change the Lens from the standard 35,000 to 250,000. It'll change it from a weird fisheye perspective to something that looks a bit more normal. It especially makes working with the face much easier.

The two tiny clipboards with left and right arrows at the bottom are where you can copy/paste a pose (this'll come in handy later!)

When you open a rig the pivot points are set to Median Point. Change this to Individual Origins (you can do this by clicking the two little white circles at the bottom as you can see below). That way the joints move according to their.. individual origins. Surprise! This means when you move multiple points at once, like the eyes or the knuckles, they move as one but act as though you were moving them separately. It avoids any weirdness, trust me!

Personally, I avoid reference pictures. I find moving my own body (or making my poor husband my muse) is much better. If that means getting into a weird position on the floor or pretending to throw something in the middle of the living room, fine. Maybe close your blinds though...

Move, Rotate & Adjust Height: First of all, make sure you're in pose mode! For the most part, we want to use the rotate feature for the body (press R for rotate or select rotate from the bottom menu. To reset a joint, press ALT+R... If you want to reset the whole body, press A twice to select all the joints, then press ALT+R) and move (press G for move or select move from the bottom menu. To reset, press ALT+G) for the face. If you move the body too much it looks distorted and we don't want that! Same for the face, you can use rotate subtly but use it too much and you'll end up in uncanny valley.

You can adjust the height of sims by using the points shown next to the dots below; try and move each one only a little bit, up or down, to avoid stretching the sim out too weirdly. You can also use the ankles, but not if you've set up an Inverse Kinematic joint on them (we'll get to that soon).

Only move your sim via the pelvis point. Do not touch the orange dot! If you do your sim might not pose in correlation to where you place your teleporter. Also try not to let your sim go below the horizontal line, otherwise they'll clip into the floor! (If you line your view up just right the line appears grey as below, otherwise it's either green or red depending on where you're facing). Leave a lil' gap for shoesies. In fact, you should leave gaps in most places to allow room for clothes etc. So don't make the sim directly touch their leg for example, or their hand will clip into their pants!

Joint Locking: I always work with the bottom two knuckle joints locked on every finger, we don't want any demented fingies! I also lock the jaw point, so no matter which direction I'm facing when I move it, it'll only ever move up or down. You can always unlock them if you're trying to achieve a certain look, but for the most part we don't want them moving in any other way.

Select the joint/joints (you can select multiple joints at once by either pressing C and dragging the mouse over the points, or by pressing B and dragging a box over them) and lock W, X & Y. Once you've done this, save your rig! That way, you won't have to do it every time.

Inverse Kinematics: I have these set up for each leg, arm, finger and thumb to save time. It means that when you move the bottom joint (eg. the finger tip, wrist or ankle) the whole limb moves with it. It's especially useful for the thumbs & arms since they tend to behave themselves better. Stick with three for the thumb, fingers and ankle joints.. with the wrist point, you can go up to four and it'll include the clavicle joint too. Though it's a fussy one, so I prefer to move this alone for the most part. You can always change it temporarily if you want!

To do this, click on the lil' bone with a chain underneath on the right side, as below, and choose Inverse Kinematics. Then change the Chain Length to 3. Save your rig again so you don't have to set everything up next time!

Be especially careful when using this method to move the fingers as it'll throw out those locked joints we mentioned earlier! I really only use these ones to move them ever so slightly.

Also, be careful when using it to move the legs (and sometimes the arms) as they can be unpredictable! It's best to rotate the joints separately to give it an idea of what you're going for, then use the joint to move the limb into a more natural position. You can see underneath how demented it can look if you don't give it a general idea before you start... I used the exact same movement here on the left/right (slightly up and to the left) but the right one started with the knee bent.

Ripping off EA: Use EA animations to save yourself some time! Almost any animation in game can be found/used. To do this go to the Sims 4 Studio > create a new animation > save the package (I called mine RIGBASE) > open it in S4Studio and choose your rig (eg. female, male, child etc.) and pick "EA Clip" > find an animation to work from > export and save the pose > open the pose in blender. You can work from here, or you can copy the pose (press A twice until all points turn blue, then click on the left clipboard at the bottom to copy it) paste it onto your own rig and work from there instead.

This method is super helpful when you're a beginner, or for more tricky body positions. There's no point wasting time, faffing around posing the rig into a kneeling position when there's a perfectly good base you can work from.

Frankenposing: In a similar vein to the above, frankenposing can also save a huge amount of time. So, you've got two poses.. let's say one stood up and one sat down. You want the emotion/arm movements from the standing pose, but you can't be arsed making them sit down. No worries! Copy the top half (press C to select several points at once or B to click and drag) and paste it onto a previous pose you've made (or ripped off EA.. heh). Adjust accordingly and voila!

Move slowly: If you want your sim to bend over, lean to the side, look up etc etc.. you can't just snap their neck/spine or whatever. You've got to work your way down/up to it. Eg. Your sim's looking up; so start from the bottom of the spine, tip it back a bit, move to the middle, tip it back a bit... Right up until you get to the neck. This is where moving your own body comes in handy! 9 times out of 10 we don't just move one body part.

So let's say your sim wants to touch their noggin'. Don't just grab the wrist and try and drag their arm up to their head, it won't look right. First, adjust the clavicle upwards a bit. Then you can grab your wrist and move the arm into a rough position. Rotate your elbow and pose your fingies (you can adjust them more perfectly later, we just need an idea to begin with). Now you should be able to lift the arm and it won't look demented.

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