Week 3 - Creating the Hands and Arms (using techniques such as 'Bridging', 'Attaching' and 'Bevelling')

At this stage, the arms and hands had been created using primitive objects; an extruded cylinder for the arm (with three 'mini' extrusions where the upper-arm meets the fore-arm, and at the wrist), and a box object for the hand (selecting various vertices to pull it into a common shape, and then using the bevel tool on the four exterior-facing polygons at one end of the hand to generate the fingers, rotating each Poly slightly away from the next to ensure equal spacing)
The thumb was created in a similar manner, but this time selecting a Poly to the upper right of the hand closest to the wrist. Rather than using the Extrude tool, I wanted to create the ovalised-shape of the end of the thumb, and this was achieved by bevelling out the final section to get a wider, flatter shape

Before joining the hand to the arm, I noticed that I would need to adapt the basic cylindrical shape of the arm-structure. By using the bridge tool, I could delete the Polygons connecting the shoulder, elbow and the wrist and, after selecting the Borders, I proceeded to create another section of Polys, but this time I could modify them into realistic muscle and increased mass, a la a common shop manneqiun

 

Next, I deleted the rear-most Polygons of the hand, got hold of the vertices that made up the border of this now hollow object, and began to manipulate them into a rough oval - this was so that the bridging would be more accurate and (hopefully) have as minimal distortion as possible

Unfortunately, try as I might, there was a small hiccup when bridging, as the number of vertices in both sections were different, leading to the discrepancy shown above: two edges from the hand had to be lead into one vertex of the wrist, which would lead to mild pinching...

With a MeshSmooth applied, the appearance of said pinching is ever-so more apparant. However, it was remarked to me that I could perhaps be attributed to the irregular construction of a mannequin, as per in real-life, and may even provide a greater adaptive quality when I bone the wrist to rotate as part of the animation

 

In this rendered image here, the arm is facing downwards, protrusion of the knuckles signifying this clearly, while the slight fold where the upper-arm meets the fore-arm at the elbow is another example of a potential adaptive quality when boning this area  in a natural bend (again, found on shop mannequins)

Using ALT+X, I made the arm-hand object transparent while I created the bones to allow me to bend the thumb/fingers into a natural, relaxed semi-clenched position and, although Manny's hands wouldn't be animated (other than rotating at the wrist), I still wanted to keep a smooth and progressive motion to reach that positioning. Here, the construction of the bones is visible; a single one going from the wrist, with another connecting a set of three bones (for each finger) and two bones (for the thumb) back to that wrist-bone

  

Once I was happy with the bones postions, I used the Wire Parameters option (having right-clicked on the first thumb-bone) to attach a dummy helper to control rotational movment along the Y axis. The green helper box allows animation of a skinned material to be manipulated by a boned section of the mesh, as well as allowing the user to merely seek out which helper controls which bone, rather than clicking and un-clicking each bone around the skinned mesh in order to find the correct one for that point in the animation!

  

This screenshot demonstrates the window in which the user can specify the order and axial-direction along which the Parameter Wiring will take place. Here, I am assigning the dummy on a Y-axis bezier-float euler to constrain the float-wire of Bone 13, at the base of the thumb (I will rename each bone properly before I clone this arm, honest...)

  

I crossed my fingers as I assigned the exact same command to each individual finger bone, using the same method as before, even going so far as to assign the outer-most thumb bone along the X-axis, so that I would rotate it slightly, to follow a human triat we have to be able to clech our thumb atop our fingers (say, when we're making a fist). Much to say, I was extremely happy with the result - no obvious distortion visible and no problems with the MeshSmooth disrupting either

  

A rendered shot of the hand, demonstrating how, after much deliberation, the decision to make each finger just that little bit irregular from each of the others has meant that the clenched-form isn't uniform - exactly what I intended to happen, for once

  

The other item that was needed before I finished with the limb was to add the attachment for when the arm will be rotating through 90degrees. This was a simple case of selecting four adjacent Polygons near the shoulder, along the same line as the closed-hand, thus allowing the hand to face inwards to the torso. The Polys were then extruded in two layers, with the top layer having both downward facing Polygons bevelled, as shown above

  

It was at this stage I attempted to add in the bone to allow the elbow the bend, but I couldn't, for some reason, get the bone to react to the dummy I'd set up for it exclusively, and when I tried rotating it, the bone just lifted out of the skinned mesh of the arm! Odd, but I'll come back to it another time...

  

Here is a render of the right-arm: the fold at the elbow and slight discrenpancy is obvious, granted, but the MeshSmooth really has enhance the appearance of the mannequin's intentional gloss-texture