CGTalk - Hand rigging quest

Geuse

03-25-2010, 10:02 PM

Hey, So I saw the other thread, but since it was more of a request I thought of starting another one.
I've been thinking about how to rig a realistic hand. Mostly I'm interested in how to get as close to the anatomy as possble to convey a feeling of realism when animating the fingers. In all the rigs I've seen thus far they consist of straight FKchains which doesn't look realistic at all once the hand closes to a fist. Now this is the part I'm having problems with and also from where my question originates.

When you animate hand poses do you use pure FK and bend them freely to desired result or is there a way to lay the joints out and orient in a fashion so that once you curl them in Z(for ex.) they rotate accordingly in a realistic fashion?

So I've tried different solutions and this test is just to visualize what the result should be closer to. In this test I've used fk joints which are animated from flat hand to closed and all the joints have been manipulated which means they both twist and bends to go from 1st position to final posiition. So basically there's interpolation happening and on the way the finger's might look broken although I don't think it's that obvious in this test.

http://www.thedagnode.com/files/blast2.avi
http://www.thedagnode.com/files/blast4.avi
http://www.thedagnode.com/files/blast5.avi

Darksuit

03-26-2010, 02:51 PM

one reason you are not going to see a whole lot of effort put into rigging the hand is due to its priority of importance. In games the first two places I start removing polys are feet and hands. This is because if the hands are not in the forefront of the animation most of the time, then the hands are going to be overlooked, you can fake most of what happens with the hand. In the case of the foot, most of the time it gets cut off due to framing. The hand (except in a few cases (Thing from adams family) is just not that intresting.

It really comes down to Framing and focus of intrest, as to why there is soo little effort put into rigging the hand or foot in most cases.

mlefevre

03-26-2010, 04:06 PM

Geuse, check out this fantastic post. Some really interesting research by Igor Stefanovich.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=5383691&postcount=1

Geuse

03-26-2010, 05:26 PM

Thanks alot to the both of you.
Even though it's as you say, the front of the hand will not be shown I still like to be able to understand some more about the complexity of the hand to apply it to feature character where it definetly will have to look great.

I know that the pinky metacarpal allows you to cup the hand. Judging by my own hand this seems to apply to the ring metacarpal aswell although the movement it perform is only minor. But how is this movement achieved. Is it only by rotation in one axis or several. But what I'm most interested in is finding the angles in which the different bones rotate in. I guess I have to do some more tests...

Also I guess the golden ratio something that is important to consider when laying out your joints
Thanks alot for the link. that looked great, but the pinky metacarpal doesn't seem to move. Perhaps it only moves when you cup the hand?

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03-26-2010, 05:26 PM

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