Handy to have Hands

fearian

Hey guys! To help procrastinate I thought I would do a study on hands and model up some hands I can use for projects. I took a look at the Polycount Wiki (Standing on the sholders of giants! :P) and started from the fingers!

After experimenting a bit, I started picking an choosing different techiniques I saw which looked good for me, and tried to develop my own method.

I'll be using this model for game characters and animation when I am done, and maybe as first person hands.







So, crits? paintovers? Will this go into zbrush ok if I need to? All info welcome!

Harry

Is this for any particular engine? if it supports nice weighting and stuff you could put in some more musculature

art911

Hands have always been pretty tough for me, so I wish you luck. I think its looking good so far, but I agree with Harry, it would look better with weighting and musculature if you can get away with it.

Mark Dygert

Thats a pretty good hand. A lot of studying can be done by rigging them up too and trying out different kinds of poses then trying out different kinds joints and seeing where some topo can be cut and or added.

Crits:
-The fingers and first knuckles might be too far apart, leading to pitch fork hands. If you put your actual human fingers pointing straight out (karate chop!) theres a good chance they all touch, and they fan out when you spread them out. The fingers in your model have pretty big gaps but are not fanning out, could make them hard to bring together or might make an odd fist.

- I am not too sure how the bottom underside of the fingers would be weighted, you might get some clipping issues, but then again it all depends on the joint placement and the weighting, it could work fine...

- I think it the fingers would loose too much volume if you sub-d it once or twice, leading to another classic problem, starfish fingers. And all the tris would make a bunch of poles or might just freak out. Its worth trying but dont be shocked if it freaks out on ya. Normally all quads or as close to is best for sculpting. Thats not to say this wont make for a good set of low poly final hands, it probably will, after some serious rig tests.

Good stuff keep it flowing!

Firecracker197

Your hand looks good, your probably gunna have trouble if you want to bring it into zbrush tho like Vig said.

Here is what you want your loops to look like if you want to zbrush:



See no triangles the shape is really easy to change too once you get it into zbrush so that's not as important.

you can thank Spark for that too btw (this is what I looked at to learn)

Farfarer

Is there a reason you've brought the knucle joints down to 1 vertex then expanded them back to 2 vertices in the centre? I'd have thought it was better to have it drop down to two ans remain at that for the rest the lower half's loop -as it might end up clipping with itself but the mass/volume would remain more faithful.

You'll probably find that fingers aren't usually as evenly spaced as that in a relaxed pose. The middle and ring finger tend to bunch together and the pinky drifts off a little more.

As for sculpting with that, Firecracker's (or Spark's) example is a better option. Triangles can cause some issues in sculpting apps, you'd do better to make a sort fo mid-poly basemesh that's nicely quadded.