So these past weeks I’ve been working on the hands, that is: the mesh, the rig, and the animations.
The design of the hands and the device was finalized early the second week of work.
Making the mesh for the hands went pretty smoothly. I worried that I couldn’t make the hands look good and function well with a limited triscount but when I was satisfied with how they looked the tris count wasn’t really that high so I worried over nothing.
The device was more difficult to make then I anticipated. My sketch of it was pretty inaccurate and the front view and side view drawing didn’t match. When I used them as reference I ended up having to change a lot in order for it to be placed believably around the hand.
I jumped back and forth between 3ds Max and Motionbuilder a lot at this point to make sure that the device wasn’t cutting into wrist while bending it up and down.
The total triscount of both the arms is 2912. With the device it’s 4540.
Rigging and skinning the hands, that took time. I do not know how many times I’ve skinned those hands. There where many times where something on the rig was wrong or having to make adjustments to the skinning.
I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to put animations into Unity. Once I thought I had it figured out but then the next time I tried it did not work.
But now it is all working nicely and I’ve been working on a base for all the animations and I feel like I really can start animating the hands now.
Frida Svensson 