posing difficulties

So I really tried to get the same pose from my concept. Firstly, the jacket wasn't zremeshing well enough to have good lower subdivisions, so I chose to re-sculpt that around the new pose since it would deform a lot anyway. Zspheres gave me a bunch of strange deformation on the torso when I moved the arms, so I scrapped that and went for the automatic rigging in Maya. I used weight painting to navigate around the huge deformations, which sorta worked with some stray wacky geometry still.

Once I finished up what I could manage, I plugged it back into zbrush, annnnnd the body was the only subtool not to retain the higher subdivisions. I really wanted to get the posed body back into keyshot, but there was no point without the body. I'm feeling it might be a better idea for me to continue with a pose that doesn't lift the arms.