Hey all,

I'm new to game character development but I've learned many of the Maya foundations. What I never learned before was how to make a character skeleton/rig. It seems easy enough, but not in my case, it looks to be alot more difficult than would be otherwise....

See what I'm basically doing here, for now, instead of creating my own character I am editing one from a game. I want to do several things including edit the model and completely retexture/map it. I also want to, at the very least, be able to pose it when its finished and then I can make alot of high res 'render poses' for my amusement and for others. But now I may have to give him a skeleton right away before I do the other things because - he is not in the T pose!

I mean... I was shocked when I saw that cause I thought characters are always saved into that pose by default. I also do not have the skeletal information for this character, meanwhile his arms are laying against his SIDES >.< So if I am to have any way of tweaking this characters shape, I need him to be in the T pose FIRST. Right?

So I ask you.... what should I do here? Can I just rig his arm/shoulder or something and get it moved into the right position, and I don't have to skin/weight it or anything right? Maybe I should do a rigid bind.

I'm a little confused, maybe I should show a screenshot. this is a human male, toned, and I want to be sure that I can rotate the shoulder and arm properly out of the way and not really mess up the mesh in the process.

Any ideas?