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.