Animated finger digits for mesh hands

[hh3000]

Hi all,

A friend of mine showed me what their mesh head could do, I saw the avatar close her eyes and cry, I was really blown away so I was wondering if it's possible to animate the mesh hand and digits and if this is being done can somenone PLEASE tell me.

Thanks,

HH3000

[Sassy Romano]

Eyelids is very easy as the simplest positions would involve open or closed.  Even opening and closing of eyelids is no more complex than two static states and can be accomplished by an animated texture revealing or covering the eye.

As for hands, there are so many different ranges of motion that other than a few static posed digits, it becomes complex and we can already achieve the same with scripting of a number of morphs.

There are no bones in the hands that can be animated, that's basically the problem when it comes to proper hand control.

[Janelle Darkstone]

I have a pair of prim hands I use for photography.  The HUD does have a feature to cycle through the static poses to give some illusion of natural movement but I really can't imagine wearing them just for that.  I'd guess some people might, though?

Hopefully someone, somewhere is hard at work making mesh hands that can do this and look more realistic.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Funny you mention that. That was one of my major pet peeves with mesh hands when I looked for them a few days ago. As a previous poster said, there are no bones to animate. However... it's in principle piss easy to create the illusion of moving fingers, even though it's from a technical perspective a bit more work.

Here's now: Make the hand the "root" of the linkset, add each finger as a separate mesh. Since we have 8 faces per mesh, add 7 differently bent positions (we need one texture for nails). Do that for all 5 fingers. Done. Now you can animate each finger by flipping the 7 texture alphas and create almost any hand pose you care to use. Unless the scripter is totally daft it doesn't introduce any more lag, unless you constantly wiggle your fingers.

Btw I did not invent that technique, it's been around forever for some sculpted furry avi hands. There they flip the sculpt texture - same idea. With one of my old furry avis I can create almost any pose, easily. Including triggering them from a gesture via chat command, it even moves my arm into any desired position... to flip people off, make the "victory" sign, thumbs up/down, "hold" things properly, coyly cover my mouth with my hand etc.pp.

I've just been too lazy to approach Slink about it. It'd be quite possible to create updated mesh hands with the same UV mapping, meaning all existing appliers would work fine with more useful hands.

[LepreKhaun]

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Jenni Darkwatch wrote:

Funny you mention that. That was one of my major pet peeves with mesh hands when I looked for them a few days ago. As a previous poster said, there are no bones to animate. However... it's in principle piss easy to create the illusion of moving fingers, even though it's from a technical perspective a bit more work.

Here's now: Make the hand the "root" of the linkset, add each finger as a separate mesh. Since we have 8 faces per mesh, add 7 differently bent positions (

we need one texture for nails

). Do that for all 5 fingers. Done. Now you can animate each finger by flipping the 7 texture alphas and create almost any hand pose you care to use. Unless the scripter is totally daft it doesn't introduce any more lag, unless you constantly wiggle your fingers.

Btw I did not invent that technique, it's been around forever for some sculpted furry avi hands. There they flip the sculpt texture - same idea. With one of my old furry avis I can create almost any pose, easily. Including triggering them from a gesture via chat command, it even moves my arm into any desired position... to flip people off, make the "victory" sign, thumbs up/down, "hold" things properly, coyly cover my mouth with my hand etc.pp.

I've just been too lazy to approach Slink about it. It'd be quite possible to create updated mesh hands with the same UV mapping, meaning all existing appliers would work fine with more useful hands.

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I've emphasized the one flaw in this (otherwise well thought out) approach.

The fingernails will remain in one place while the fingers flex.

 

[Sassy Romano]

The method could be modified to account for finger nails too, it's just faces and linksets with alpha flipping.  The mesh would just need constructing a little differently than expecting one face only for the finger nails.

[LepreKhaun]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

The method could be modified to account for finger nails too, it's just faces and linksets with alpha flipping.  The mesh would just need constructing a little differently than expecting one face only for the finger nails.

---

Right, each finger could have four "postures", each consisting of a finger and nail texture face. Then it would simply be a matter of "turning on" pairs of faces for each possiblity.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Yep my bad. 4 positions, the fingernails need flipping too. So, 8 faces = 4 finger positions (or mesh it differently and get however many positions you like). It does work though, I did for the hell of it create a dummy mesh for just that.

[Monti Messmer]

How would that work if you e.g. grab a glass or whatever ?

Monitor the animations ? Or just for walking around with moving hands where i doubt that´s kinda useless because most wouldn´´t notice.

With all the extra work to do wouldn´t that be an H-Bomb on rats ? ;-)

On the Jira for new fitted mesh there is already a request for a few more bones, maybe maybe mabye

Monti

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Most of the furry avis where the hands/fingers can be controlled do so via gesture and/or HUD. It works pretty well actually.

[hh3000]

Hi Jenni, is there someone I can talk to who can apply those same sought of techiques to a human hand, cause I want to use the mesh hands for machinima.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Not that I know of, no. Sorry. You may want to approach Slink or any of the other makers and see if they are willing to do it.