Modelling, Texturing and Animating a Hand

by Julian MacDonald



This tutorial will take you through modelling a hand, applying a texture to it, setting up a skeleton and using the skeleton to create a series of gestures to be used in creating an animation. Hopefully this will cover a whole process so you can see how the various elements of Art of Illusion come together to create something impressive.

Why a hand ? Well it's something we see every day and so is well known to us. It also has good potential for animation because of all the joints in all the digits.

Right, let's get on with it. Click on the section titles below to find out more on each aspect:



Modelling the Hand

In this section, I'll be looking in detail at the way we can model a hand using the triangle mesh editor. Various mesh techniques will be used.


Setting up the Skeleton

To allow more efficient and effective animation of the hand, this section will describe how to rig up a skeleton for the hand we modelled in the previous section.


Adding a Texture

This section looks at the options we have available for adding a surface texture to the hand.


Animating the Hand

Finally, in this section I'll be looking in detail at how to use a Pose Track to make the hand move.