Character rig spine compression

jwcjaygaines

Haven't had much luck on YouTube for this answer, so here goes. I have characters imported with Diffeomorphic that I have rigged using MHX. I've also imported a couple of sitting poses and applied them to the character. One thing I've noticed, however, is that it never looks 100% realistic, and after further cross referencing, I realized it was because a real human's spine compresses (somewhat) whenever they're sitting. You know, gravity and bad posture and whatnot. So I tried to mimic this in Blender with insane results. The spine/chest bones are locked into place by default, so I tried tampering with their tweak bones. Had some better success until it came time to bring the neck and head down as well, and then all heck broke loose. Now I have a squished giraffe-human thingy. After laughing for a half-hour, I tried to find a solution, but alas, couldn't. So is there some kind of trick or rigging or constraints I should use instead? 

Padone

You use the IK controls to strike the pose, then you can use the tweak bones to help with bendings and deformations. Both MHX and rigify work this way, being rigify better for posing in blender and MHX better to import daz poses. When striking a pose be sure to keyframe all the bones or they may interpolate differently in the timeline. Apart this there's no other "tricks" you can use.