Animated fingers

# 1 16-06-2008 , 02:45 AM

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Hi pliz help me , i have modeled a human hand with 5 fingers and i want to animate the fingers closing down 1 by 1 into a fist and am getting stuck in selecting the one finger at a time to animate. Is it possible to select 1 finger from a hand modeled from only 1 polygon cube:headbang:

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# 2 16-06-2008 , 03:01 AM

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If I'm getting what your asking, you will have to look into rigging, theres quite a lot of free tutorial on the net going over the process

"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

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# 3 16-06-2008 , 03:12 AM

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Thankx a lot , let me go thru the rigging tutorila and see if i will win.

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# 4 16-06-2008 , 03:40 AM

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Once you have rigged the hand, read up about Set Driven Keys which will help you animated the fingers.

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# 5 16-06-2008 , 10:58 AM

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yeah, you definitely need this rigged in order to do what you say you want to do.
Rigging is going to allow you to get smooth animation on your fingers as well as proper deformation. But there is a lot involved such as painting weights and then finally animating.

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# 6 16-06-2008 , 07:03 PM

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if its just a finger you could use

a wire deformer

or non-linear deformer

or a lattice deormer

or a blendshape

or create a skeleton in the finger, smooth bind to the finger, shift select from the first joint you made (at the wrist) until you get to second to last.., press 'E' for rotate.., and that should work user added image

this last choice also works well for things like birds wings.., very simple box model birds seen from a distance, it will not stand up to close inspection (close camera shot)

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# 7 16-06-2008 , 09:02 PM

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animated finger*2

Thankx guys yo advice worked wonders for me. I did a skeleton to my hand and then smooth bind.And this then takes me to my next question. I animated the fisrt finger, and i am having problems in animating the sequence , i mean to say for example when a u r counting using yo fingers 1 2 3 4 5, u have the finger animated rotating to represent 1 and then the next finger going up making them 2 fingers up nw representing a 2, that kind of sequence. I hope i have explained my problem well. How do i animate that, coz am only animating the first finger.

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# 8 16-06-2008 , 09:10 PM

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As john said, have a look into set driven keys.

"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

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# 9 16-06-2008 , 09:22 PM

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or

the first joint is the 'root' at the wrist

if you have one finger working you can get them all to.

put the joints in the other fingers keeping that first joint the root joint (the skeleton of each finger should be connected to that first joint)

now shift select in the same way you did for one but do it for all of the, do not select the root joint.., should work..,

as has been mentioned.., probably better to use set driven key.., but this is a quick and dirty way to do it (my way that is, not the SDK)

i dont think this is a clear explanation so good luck

take it easy and life will be easy

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# 10 18-06-2008 , 08:19 PM

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texturing the hand

Hi Guys

I modelled my basic human hand and animated it. I now want to add detail to my hand.....I want to apply texturing so that it looks like a real hand.Pliz help , how do i go about it.

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# 11 18-06-2008 , 09:12 PM

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ok well you can't add resolution and tweek your model after it has been bound so you can only add a texture and to do that you need to UV map geometry of the hand and lay the UV's out flat in the 0 - 1 space of the UV Texture Editor if it is made of polygons.
Once the UV's are layed out you can create a texture to apply to your model.

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# 12 19-06-2008 , 08:11 AM

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umm..??? see mikes free tutorial on texturing user added image

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# 13 19-06-2008 , 03:35 PM

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Having done this exact thing I would recommend rigging the hand and then putting Set Driven Keys on the wrist joint or a hand control. This may take a long time to set up, but it provides better control that the other options.

With the SDK, you can fully set the hand for every possibility:

Bend on one finger
Bend on each finger
Create a fist
Point
Thumbs Up
Close fingers together
Spread fingers open
Rude Guestures
ect...
ect...

I recommend this set up rather than a fast easy approach and you'll learn something too user added image