Technical Slop

Pui Pui Entry 4

Okay, let's deal with the hand. But first, a little warning. I'm still getting the hang of a workflow that follows my progress with the things that I want to show. So, there will be some inconsistancies. Mainly, the knuckles for this. Originally I said 3 cuts along the top, but I decided on only two. I'll be showing how I made the fingers with two cuts, but the hand that I will be showing later has 3 cuts along the top. The final hand that I have, which I won't be showing any time soon, has 2 cuts. If you are really sharp, you might be able to spot another foobar or two of mine.

Let's start with a base finger.

Upper-left: This is a cylinder primitive. It's got 6 sides and an extra height segment. Kind of hard to tell, but the middle line on the top is selected.

Upper-right: The middle line on the top that's selected got itself a bit of Chamfer. Again, hard to see, but you should be able to see the 'V' shape it created on the side. Pretty quick and sleazy way to turn one cut into two.

Lower-left: I want the bottom of the 'V' to be welded to the vert that's already down there. So I grabbed them and welded them together real quick on both sides.

Lower-right: With the kah-nuckle taken care of, I went on to giving the finger tip some depth. In the front hex, there is already a vert dead center, but I need two for what I have in mind. A quick Divide Edge and I have the two verts that I want. After that, it's just a matter of moving the verts into place, turning some edges, and pulling them out a tad.

If I have to start getting stingy with faces, the extra faces in the finger tips are the first to go.

Base finger done. Time to make a hand and stitch it all together.

Went to Fine Art and grabbed a hand pic for reference.Fine Art is great. Get to know it! Took the pic into PhotoShop, did some operating, and tossed it into Max.

(Notice that the kah-nuckles have 3 cuts instead of 2. I've already fixed this for the hand that I will be using. This picture is basically a false start.)

Okay, base fingers are in place. A little rotate and a little non-uniform scale. For the pinky/ring, I sliced a few polys and moved some verts back. Sorry for the quick explaination on that.

That blue line is a "hard" spline. That is, the spline has *no* curvature to it at all. The red blotches show were the anchor points are.

I Extruded the spline, gave it two height segments, and deleted the polys were the fingers are going to go.

Then I welded the hand verts to the finger verts. After that, it was just a matter of more divide edge, edge turning, vert welding, and vert moving. The hand on the right isn't exactly the finished hand that I will be using, but it's awlfully close. One last note on the hand: the wrist has 7 verts and edges. I decided that 7 is the magic number for the wrist. Later on, I might drop it down to 6 (or even 5, depending on how stingy I have to get with the faces).

That's about it for the hand for now. It's all saved out and no more tweaking until it's time to stitch onto the body.

Coming Soon: Preliminary Face Fiddling!
Earlier today I did some preliminary face stuff and came to some decisions. I'll fill you folks in on this junk later.

play.fiddle.learn