Zounds and Hands!
Friday, October 7th, 2011
No, just hands.
I’ve been working on these hands for the past couple of days trying out a new way to model things like hands, and really most organic forms. A lot of people favor a cylinder or box extrusion method for making organic shapes, but for a base mesh like this, I find the best way is to actually make small elongated boxes for each main shape, and then form all that together over time. The advantage of this is that you can focus only on getting the form and proportion right (based on reference) without having to worry about poly count and topology.
I also learned a neat trick from somebody in regards to hands, and that is, don’t model them all straightened out, instead model that in a relaxed pose, and not only will you get better looking results, you will also end up with a hand that is much more useable for animation as a relaxed pose with the thumb in kind of a relaxed angle off to the side is much more practical for things like gun poses and gripping poses than a stretched out hand. This also prevents major UV stretching when the hand is in the standard “90%-of-the-time” pose.
You may not know this, but character models in games like Unreal Tournament 3 are often modeled, UV mapped, and textured with the arms bent at 90 degree angles. The reason being that since the characters will run around with their arms bent holding guns and such nearly the entire time (with the exception of cutscenes and deaths), it makes much more sense to just build them that way, and then have stretching only during moments where you’re less likely to take notice.
