Research Project - Symposium

INTRODUCTION

For this project I wanted to show how to create a realistic looking hand in Maya and then animate it. I wanted to show each step in doing this from weight painting to animating. The reason I wanted to do this for my symposium is because I want to eventually be able to make my own tutorials. I want to do this as I’ve found most of the time the things I’m looking to model or the way that I learned how to do things in class is very hard to find on google or youtube or in any other format of tutorial.

Planning

I started this project by taking pictures of my hands in different angles and editing them in photoshop before I took them into Maya.

I realised about half way through modelling the hand that these two pictures were not enough to model on and that I needed a picture of the other side of my hand and also for the top of my hand.

As you can probably tell I barely edited these pictures as I wanted to continue with my modelling as quickly as possible.

I planned to practice the hand before I started following many tutorials which turned out as well as you can think.

What I did was just try to model the hand with how I thought it should be modelled, which looked fine until I smoothed it out and then it looked like the above picture. Which would be a great hand for a cartoon or an alien since it does still resemble a hand shape, but it is not great for a realistic hand, so I scraped it and started again.

Schedule

Day one to four: Model the hand

Day five to seven: Rig the hand

Day eight to eleven: Weight paint the hand

Day eleven to twelve: Animate the hand

Mood Board

STORY

Block test

As mentioned above I tried to model the hand without any tutorials. This could be considered my block test as I realised how much effort and time that would have to be put into the modelling and this is also when I realised that I would need more photo references.

DESIGN

Character Design

The character design for this was my own hands, that I photo shopped to be easier to model against. All I did was, take the picture and give it a white background. After this I gave it an outline and some extra lines to show where some of the bends and folds would be. I finally gave the background some lines to show the measurements of each picture so it would be easy to line up in Maya.

Here you can see some of the steps I took in photo shop.

Environment Design

There was no environment for this project, so I have no design for it. I suppose that I could have modelled a table and animated the hand to walk across it like in the show ‘The Adams Family’, but after I tried to weight paint it I realised just moving the fingers and having them looking realistic would be enough.

Sound

There also was no sound for this animation, but I will probably add some for the showreel on my portfolio website.

PRE-PRODUCTION

Project set up

To set up this project I placed the photos of my hands in each view screen that I was going to use. So I placed the top view of my hand into the top view panel and the rest just like that one. I then made sure that they were aligned properly before I started to model.

Modelling

When I began modelling I started with a polygon cube, I rotated it to fit the angle that my hand was in the picture. I moved the face on the side outwards and rotated that to suit the position of my thumb. I then began to model the thumb by adding in extra edge loops and extruding the face. I pulled it into position by moving the vertices to match the image.

After I shaped the palm to a reasonable extent and the thumb I deleted the faces on the top of the hand to make room for the fingers. I made a separate polygon square and then shaped it to be the right size and also aligned it with the pictures. I added extra edge loops where I thought was suitable and again shaped it using the vertices and also adding detail like the nail.

I then duplicated that finger four times and moved them across to be the other fingers. I then shaped them to suit each different finger and pulled them into the right position. I then used the target wield to connect each of the vertices of the fingers to the palm.

I continued to check everything in the smoothed mode to make sure that it looked okay. Constantly switching back and forth between the modes and views.

I spent a lot of time after this working on the palm and the back of the hand moving vertices and edges in and out to make sure that it looked realistic. I did this so you could see the knuckles clearly and the bumbs of the palm. It also helped with making the thumb look more realistic.

Rigging

When I first began rigging I had a ton of video tutorials to look over and my notes. I then noticed that all of the videos where different from each other and my notes. This is where I started to panic a bit.

I put in the bones for one finger and duplicated it over just like I had with the polygons for the finger. I then moved each bone into its proper place for each finger

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I made sure to name each bone as I knew what hassle it would cause later if I didn’t. After this I made another bone in the base of the hand, I selected all of the bones in the finger and parented it to the base.

I duplicated the base of the thumb, deleted the other joints attached to the duplicated version and connected that too the original base of the thumb. I renamed it the orbit of the thumb and rotated it so that it would rotate the same as an actual thumb instead of in the same direction as the fingers.

I then made sure to freeze the action of the thumbs rotation after I deleted the history. As you can see in the screenshots below I then tested each of the joints in the fingers to make sure that they all bent in the way I wanted them too.

When I had everything for the thumb where I wanted it to be I deleted the fourth bone from the thumb as it wasn’t needed.

I selected all the bones and then shift selected the hand mesh and bound the bones to the mesh. I did this a few times to make sure that the fingers were connected to the right bones. I had to spread the fingers out a good bit, as the first few times I bound the skin the fingers where too close to close and then when I moved one it would take some of the skin of the one next to it with it.

I created controllers or each finger and parented IK handlers to them in the hierarchy. I did this so the movement of the fingers would be more manageable. It also meant that later on if I wanted too, I could make sliders to control the IK handlers for an ABX picker.

Weight painting

Though I don’t have many screenshots of weight painting, I can definitely say it was the worst part of this project. I went through each joint in the hand from top to bottom of each finger, trying to make it seem realistic. To make sure I could see what it was like as it was moving I set up a small animation. I selected the controllers and set a key frame at the first frame and then went to around the 30th frame and moved the controllers into a different position and set a key frame there too. I did this so as I weight painted I could move around the animation to make sure everything was how I wanted it to be as I moved. I think I managed this but definitely not to the extent I wanted it to be. It is probably one of the most frustrating and boring parts of this project and I believe I’ll stick to modelling from now on.

THE ANIMATION PROCESS

Pose to pose

When I was happy enough to step away from the weight painting I set up a curve and put a camera on it. I then set up many different animation poses moving the fingers with the controllers into different positions.

You can still see where the weight painting needs to be seriously improved as the animation moves from position to position though.

Timing

I tried to space out each hand movement so that it didn’t rush into the next pose too fast. Timing came into effect more when I was trying to finger out how the hand moved to get it into the position that I wanted. This was done by staring at my own hands making the same pose over and over again until it all started to blur.

Clean up

The clean up was when I watched each animation over and over again to make sure the timing and movement of each finger was as realistic as I could make it.

POST-PRODUCTION

Rendering

I actually cheated a bit here, mainly because I hate going near lighting. So what I did, was use an application called OBS studio to record my screen. I played through the animation a few times and then brought the clip into premier pro and edited them. Cropping them so that you cannot see the menu and or layers and the cutting out bits like when I clicked into Maya and selected views.

Reflective Analysis

I enjoyed doing this project, I was really proud of how I modelled the hand and how realistic it looked. That is until I started to weight paint it. Weight painting was the bane of this project, I knew exactly what I had to do but having to fiddle with each and every part was ridiculous. I would have one finger exactly how I wanted it to be and then I’d move along in the animation and realise that, in fact no, I did not have it exactly how I wanted it to be. What I’ve learned from this project is that I love modelling (I already knew that) but also that I will gladly leave the weight painting to someone else. The fact it was so frustrating and time consuming meant I spent a lot less time animating the whole thing and I didn’t even put a texture on the hand. Then again I’m not that fond of texturing either. In conclusion making a full step by step tutorial is hard and by the end of this I realised why so many videos where different. I spent days trying out different techniques for just rigging that I ended up not even using. I think I’ll stick to trying to make tutorial videos for modelling rather than the full shebang.