How to get support for characters with shorter legs?

I’ve seen a bunch of characters which have legs that are pretty short in their models, but when I try to modify the rig to account for the shorter legs it just ends up stretching the legs out. How do other people do this properly?

Blender:
image

In-game:
image

You can’t scale or transform the armature, as the bones snap into their original orientations when animated, resulting in the stretched legs you see with your results. It’s a bit difficult to get decent results with models that don’t fit the rig as well, but I believe most people just weight the upper leg bone to the lower portion of the torso and the upper part of the leg (if the legs are long enough), with the lower leg weighted to the rest, or if the legs are too short, the upper leg unweighted and the lower leg also partially weighted to the lower portion of the torso.

Hmm, changing the weight of the legs doesn’t seem to change anything length-wise, it just messes up other parts of the model. Unless I am doing something wrong. I tried both things you said.

bump - is this still completely impossible?