Rigging a hand

I’m having a hard time getting the fingers to curl correctly into a fist. Is there a different way to rig, for example, what if I edit the mesh manually into a fist and I somehow store that pose and have blender transition between the poses? Is anything like that possible?

I’ve found a variant of this to be the easiest hand rig to use. You can create a pose library for your armature that stores predefined poses which can be mixed together, so creating a fist pose once and reusing it later on would be pretty easy.

Hi, I’m not really sure what you mean…

So are you having a hard time rigging and posing the bones to close the hand? If so, as K Horseman points out, there is more than one way to rig a finger/hand. Without any advanced rigging techniques, you’d need 3 bones for the thumb, and 3 bones per finger. If your character has 4 fingers, that means you have 3 bones for every finger, 12 bones, plus the thumb, another 3 bones, 15 bones total. Add in a few extra hand curl bones, you might be at 20 bones to pose max… As an animator, I wouldn’t want to pose 20 bones to close a hand into a fist, but it could be done. As a rigger, I would seek out a solution like K Horseman pointed you at to reduce the amount of controls needed… Always easier keyframe fewer bones.

When you say you want to edit the mesh manually, that makes me think you’re having a deformation problem… Like parts of the finger mesh are intersecting other parts of the finger mesh, when posed.

So what’s the real problem here? The rig isn’t easy to pose? Or the hand mesh isn’t deforming correctly? Two different problems having two different solutions…

Care to post an image of the problem?

Randy

I personally like to use what I call the Demitri hand Rigg (even though I add my own modifications to it) which is the Rigg that K Horseman has pointed out above in his post…
but if your new to Rigging Hands… I highly recomend you spend some time learning Nathan Vegdahl’s method too… it can really get you through all the nessisary work that you need to put together a good hand Rigg…

go here… and watch…


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