Hand Anatomy - Looking for tips & crits
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Hi all! This is my first post and I'd love to hear some pro tips & crits for my self study.
A bit bg story I am new to ZBrush and anatomy, started October 2017 and prior to that a on/off 3D artist doing amateur archviz. Currently doing ZBrush whenever available aiming to become a character artist for games/movies/figurines
A bit bg story I am new to ZBrush and anatomy, started October 2017 and prior to that a on/off 3D artist doing amateur archviz. Currently doing ZBrush whenever available aiming to become a character artist for games/movies/figurines
Replies
Nice texture and good start, keep working!
Would you care to share your real hand (or reference you are using) , who know your hand might looks just like this one
Meanwhile you can take a look at end of this topic :
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2618297#Comment_2618297
You could find quite a few things about hands construction and anatomy
Its weird tho middle finger should be the bigger and wider one but yours is slimmer then others , by the way they all look slim
Now that you mention they do indeed look slim. That may be why I keep feeling the fingers are too long?
I first started off with this image reference
Then I moved on to using my own hand as I'm able to proper study the skin and muscle movement in detail. But I'm not working on likeness, more of mixing both my own hand and the reference image above.
Can you find any differences in proportion and relation between forms ?
Made some quick changes to my understanding after seeing your notes. Haven't read the thread yet going to do it tomorrow.
1. Rotated the hand pivoting from the wrist and lined up middle finger to extensor (?).
2. Twisted the fingers to line up with the hand and inflated them.
3. Widen the wrist and adjusted the palm.
4. Readjusted the length of phalanges.
Looking forward to your correction and crits. Thank you
Just wondering why did you pick hand for first anatomical study ?
Blue lines can be parallel , in your case just happen to rotate your hand in this position
Yes phalanges are golden ration of previews but I challenge you to find metacarpals in living hand , I found that halfs work almost as good , you can find small xray of a hand explaining this phenomenon on the topic you haven't read yet
Looks like thumb, ring and pinky finger will need some rotation adjustments on their long axis , thumb is rotated ~ 60 degree from other fingers plane or easier way to remember is that thumb is looking at pinky finger , you can test that on yourself just bend your thumb , see where it hit other fingers
Don't think wrist to hand is 2:3 as wrist width is as much as 3 middle fingers and you just add small triangle for pinky base , I haven;t done research on this specific relation yet but If I have to guess base on my hand that will be 1 : 1 1/4 or 1/3
Just had a look on xray's have to say it's really interesting and helpful. Finger rotation along axis is another problem I've faced when sculpting. I can't seem to find any references relating to this till you mentioned. It greatly helps. Thank you.
I measured my palm and it read roughly 9cm whereas the wrist is roughly 6cm that's why I'm getting that conclusion. Haven't checked others yet maybe you can do it as well and let me know.
But remember you are working in 3d space, and the hand has to look correct from all angles. So, for something like this that you easily take all the reference shots you want, I'd recommend getting shots from many different angles. Or you can just look at your hand as you work.
The key thing is getting the silhouette to look right from all angles. All the minor skin detail, wrinkles, etc, can be done with texturing.
Also, anatomy is important, but if you are trying to make game models, I wouldn't spend too much time nitpicking millimeter level relationships between fingers on things as unique and varied as hands.
Overall, nice work and good attention to form. Keep it up!
Keeping focus on the silhouette as you spin around from all angles is going to ensure you've got the thing shaped correctly. Like I said above, you may be focusing in from one side for awhile, and thinking things are shaping up nicely, but if you forget to zoom out often and check from all the angles, you may realize you've pushed or pulled things out too far.
Observing your silhouette is also going to ensure you are modeling in an efficient manner. Anything that doesn't make enough of a dent on the surface to effect the silhouette would be considered a fine detail. You can do those fine details in Zbrush for your map baking, but you might find a lot of it easier to do with texturing. In any case, it's not going to kill you if you jump ahead to fine detailing before you nailed the larger but more subtle shapes, as you can always jummp back down your levels.
And you can do all the fine details in the world, but if you didn't get those key underlying forms right, things will look off and once you've had your mind on small details for awhile, you may have a hard time getting yourself to see where the problems really are.
Anyway, somebody more experienced could probably give a more useful explanation of the importance of your silhouette. It wasn't something I had heard about very much from the sources I learned from, but after I made a few characters I kind of learned to keep an eye on it just because.... well, you are building a 3d thing -- but it's actually in 2d space -- so constantly zooming out, spinning around, and looking at the silhouette lines from many different angles is akin to kind of running your hands along the model, as if you were a blind person, getting to know the shape of a thing by feel. Make sense?
But I think you already understand all this. If there is anything wrong with your model, it's microscopic nitpicker stuff. Unless the point of the exercise was for you to get scientific accuracy, I think you've done well in observing a surprisingly difficult form to model and made a convincing replication. Reason I suggest to not spend too long nitpicking is because as you move through the steps and getting into texturing, you will find out that some things are better done with your texturing app rather than sculpting, and you'll also make lots of mistakes and end up redoing things -- and all of this exactly what you need to be doing, but it can be pretty frustrating if you've already spent 30 hours perfecting detail level things like you were painting the Sistine Chapel.
I did take measurements of my hand and end up with 1:1 2/5 for wrist to hand relation which is pretty close to 2:3
Maybe attach image can shine some light on what silhouette is (in zbrush just press V and you will have your silhouette) ,Its vary important elements .You can do similar exercises on your own. It help a lot to train your eye :
breaking complex form in to simple primitive
positive negative shape ->proportion/relation, boundary and salient points
Maybe I can suggest progressive path of learning : Goldfinger -> Bammes -> Richer
Goldfinger simplification are attached below learn them and you will have a good base to build from
I'm more confused about the purpose of silhouette rather than what it actually is. So what you're saying is that it allows us to easily break down the object into base forms? Or checking the overall outline of the object at certain angle? I've read somewhere ages ago saying that a good silhouette = good form and the silhouette should be able to tell what the object is.. but say a circular silhouette can range from basketball to watermelon to pizza or wheel.. Yes it's a bad sample but that's why I don't understand this whole silhouette thing.
As you can see above everything is strip to bare minimum circle for head triangle for face rectangle for neck and trapezoid for shoulders .You can clearly establish some sort of relations between this form and end up with accurate representation then just move to smaller form
Or other way of thinking is if negative space is block of marble and you look ways to reach sculpture inside so you can either build up for cut down for head I personally think is easy to build up but for other parts its not
As for "a good silhouette = good form " that your job as designer but you probably have to invest some time in learning few basic design principals like golden ratio,gesture ,straight vs curve, rhythm, unity, line of contrast and so on
Small example of how useful silhouette can be : Bammes
its fancy layered silhouette but you get the point