I am trying to make an idle animation with a meditation effect (legs crossed) ... however when I do that the hips get ... crushed


http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4143/4793662592_55a2656206_b.jpg

(this is rendered in nifscope, using the Full Male Body by Lhamonds)


By the way, It looks totally fine on a skeleton ...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4123/4793781456_5cf5ac7c12_b.jpg

I'm not sure I'd consider the skeleton picture a lot better, it's just that the affected surface is less obvious. I think the problem is that the thigh bones have too much twist at the hip, and some of it needs to be moved to the knee joint. In the picture of the skeleton, the femoral head looks almost vertical, and it should probably only be inclined about 30 degrees from horizontal.

I don't recall if the thighs have twist helper bones like the arms have, but the idea there was to allow one bone to rotate to position the child bones, while another controlled the mesh. The two would rotate together for most purposes, but some animations would have them urn by different amounts. If the same was done for the hip joints, you may need to rotate another bone just to put the mesh back where it should be.

To me it looks like that the skeleton's hips look a bit... Twisted

I think your selecting the wrong bones in Blender. It looks like youve streched the thigh away from the hip rather than rotating the hip joint.