realized too late that my creature rig problem was actually topology around the shoulders

weights looked fine in bind pose so i kept blaming the rig for like 2 days

then the second the arms lifted past a certain angle the deltoid area started collapsing inward because the edge flow was fighting the deformation instead of supporting it. adding more cleanup weights barely helped because the loops themselves weren’t distributing tension correctly

what’s annoying is the mesh looked perfectly “clean” statically. nice wireframe screenshots, even spacing, all that

i found this rigged creature model on cgtrader afterward and the difference became pretty obvious once i compared how the shoulder loops were flowing into the chest and upper arm areas