Term 4 Week 9: Walk-through - Hands

I learnt a lot in this lecture on hands by Charles Alleneck from ILM. He told us some of the pitfalls with animating hands which I am guilty of! Things like starting the character with default hand shapes is bad (padle hands), rotating the fingers by grabbing all three joints and rotating them all the same is bad, over-animating the follow through on the fingers - another one! I'm definitely going to stop practicing these things!!

Anyway we were taught how to pose hands - how to get a dynamic pose. We looked at posing the hand to the camera to show the fingers and thumb. Posing the fingers to add tension. Putting a line of action through the hand. Grouping fingers in different combinations to simplify shapes and add appeal. It is important to avoid symmetry as it will destroy the feeling that the hand is an organic thing and will start to look robot. When animating the hands we must try to get some lead and follow with the fingers so that not all of them move at the same time. The each segment of the fingers move a different timings and amount of rotation so breaking this up will add to the realism of the hand.

Here's my refining pass:

We also had to pose a hand to the reference: