In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we take on the process of rigging the fingers to a human hand with only a few bones and constraints. This technique leaves you with fingers that are very easy to animate and control without the need for IKs or Drivers.
Note: this tutorial technique is based on the original Russian tutorial from Dimetri here: http://vimeo.com/10685206 Great thanks out to Dimetri for talking with us and creating some awesome rigs.
Will soon have a look!
I am doing a course in 3D with blender and I am up to the final “thing” to do. I animation of 30 s with good moddeling, lightning and colors. This will be helpful cause I was not to happy with my last rigg
Best regards
Jonathan, I’m curious as to the benefits of this rig over the older and seemingly easier to use scale and rotate control?
Here’s a tip for the weight painting and auto weight paint for those that are having the same problems as Jonathan.
Use B-Bones and scale the boxes so that they envelope the fingers, also you need a bone for the hand. (this is the key one that Jonathan forgot) If our real hand had bones only in our fingers then our hand would act pretty funny ^^
Make sure to scale the B-Bone for the hand, this will help to control it’s influence.
One other tip to go with this video, when applying the same value to multiple objects, select all the objects, input the value to the field box then right click and choose copy to selected. (no more select, paste, repeat…)
Hey, thanks for the tut.
What software do you use to record these? I’m interested in doing some blender tutorials.
Thanks Jonathon, I had watched Dimetri’s tutorial, but the language darrier was a problem
.
@ Nathan Hauck: This is just another way. The “Mancandy Method” of one bone control is basically achieved here by the main bone, but fine tuning that with the joint controls can be easily accomplished in a predictable way. Also any time you can avoid a driver, and achieve the same result I’d say that is a good thing.
@ Dimetri It is so refreshing to see as new method for fingers!
ah ok, was just a bit confused since the finger is basically a pulley system causing the joints to basically bend in the same manner every time with little control, but i guess it’s good for outside influences
“Copy to selected” is an awesome tip, Wasa!
Nice to see a different approach at hand’s rigging. Also “Copy to Selected”, thanks for that tip!
Off topic!
Anyone knows a good setups (tutorial) for foot rigs?
ya check out demetrii’s shaman rig, the whole thing has a pretty cool setup
i think the hand rig is from a video that shows how to set up the feet too, but haven’t had a chance to look at it
Here’s the best foot rigging tutorials I’ve seen. This is from the rig they’re now integrating into MakeHuman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SNZJPEh0o&playnext_from=TL&videos=RUQnbWHxBWQ
Love it! excellent tutorial!
Nice english translation! Actually, I think your’s was better all the way around. I actually ran across Dimitri’s tutorial a while back, and wasn’t able to glean that much from it because he speaks Russian. My favorite part: no IK!
Quick tip:
using the same technique, we could take it a bit further, to control the 5 fingers with a single bone:
- create another bone
- place it above the hand
- copy its rotation to the five finger controllers using a “copy rotation” constraint.
I agree with Wasa: Adding a hand bone would have cause the auto weighting to give most of the palm to the hand bone, and the later paint tweaks would have been much smaller and easier. As it is, the palm is broken up and controlled by the five innermost finger bones…
Otherwise great tutorial. It may have been Dimetri’s rig, but you explain it, and how to build it, really well!
Janathan you are such a good communicator, thank you!
It was educational watching you struggle with weight painting too. I have to run through that trick you did to remove influence too, really helpful does it remove the verts from the group or remove their weight?
Any tricks for painting verts that have become internalized in the pose, eg. suppose you bend the first joint and find that bending the second joint distorts the inside/ underside of the first joint. It would be easiest to correct this with the first joint bent but the verts that are misbehaving are now buried within the fold/ crease of the finger.
Last, how should I add curl to the palm now with these finger arnmatures?
Thank you for the encouragement Lyle!
1. When you adjust the influence on a vertex group is adjusts the weight. However, if you adjust said weight to zero then it affectively removes those vertices from the group. In some ways they are one and the same.
2. When you have an intersecting mesh I do not believe their is a way to paint on the hidden portions without adjusting the pose.
3. You could add the same curl effect to the palm by duplicating the finger bones and positioning, resizing to fit the palm. Be sure to take into account the number of edgeloops you have in the palm, though. If you do not have enough you will not get nearly so good deformation.
Cheers!
Jonathan
Thanks for the tutorial! Good tips from Wasa and Piiichan, too; the comments section is a great place to share information.
Hey Jonathan,
Thanks for that great and easy-to-follow transplation.
I run into some problems rigging a hand that way:
I used a Ctrl-Bone to curl the finger. I locked RotY and didnt locked RotZ, so I am able to spread the fingers later.
On the finger-bones (fing_01[base], fing_02 and fing_03[tip]) I locked RotY and on fing_02+fing_03 RotZ aswell.
Now, if I’m using my Ctrl-Bone to spread the fingers fing_02 + fing_03 get some rotation on Z. I dont know why but I’m shure I made an error in reasoning.
Please, tell me what I’ve done wrong.
Greetings
Robert
Hey, nice tutorial….i´m from Brazil and i having problens with my wiegth painting, you say that red = 100% control of the afacted area… But… a probable has checked a box how make this all wrong…with me is happening this:
red = 100%
green =100%
yellow = 100%
blue = 0%
everything is equal 100% except for the blue…. no matter to wight color…. it alwys will be moved 100% with the bone….
any solutions?
THANKS
very nice tutorial….
Hi Jacob,
This problem is most likely due to Envelopes still being enabled for the armature. With these enabled Blender takes both the weight paint and envelopes into account when transforming the bones, which could result in the effect you’re seeing. To fix this, try turning off “Envelopes” for the Armature modifier.
Best of luck!
-Jonathan
Thanks man, problem solved…
awesome site
I thought I was always gonna dread animation
Thank You Jonathan
I just got a hand from the freebies human, and i started the tut, then when it came to rotating the first two rotated normally but the last instead of rotating downwards it rotated to the right. How do i fix this?
Alright nm, i fixed it
New Issue, I parented the armature to the model and it will animate when i move it, but when I go into weight paint and select the parts of the armature (it is in pose mode) the model is still dark blue. any1 know how i can fix it?
From what I’ve noticed what painting problem happened because there was no wrist bone. The weights were just going going fro one to another when.
But I have to tell you, I’ve learned in 30 mins what I tryed for a day to discover. Thank you alot
Hey, do you think that you could do a translation of the other riggings, or are they simple enough to where there wouldn’t be a point. It would be interesting to see one like they used for sintel.
Dama animating in blender is a little frustating. I wondering if Daz studio is a better choice.
Where did he get the hand model?
I made it
The model is available via the source files; which are available free to all Citizen Members. http://cgcookie.com/membership
-Jonathan
Nice redo, Jonathan, and a great explaination of how to set this up. And I see that there is a footrig in the comments, I’ll check that one out. Once I’ve played with those, hopefully I can extend that through the CG Cookie series on the site to the rest of the body.
Thanks again, just what I was looking for!
hey this is great but how do i add this to the rest of my armature
I love the simplicity of this; thanks for bringing it into the English-speaking world.
One question (and a bit of preamble):
I’m creating a set of cartoonish characters and, rather than doing individual arms/hands for each, I just copied and pasted one arm for all (with appropriate resizing and X-axis flipping).
So, can I rig/weight-paint just the one arm and then somehow append/link/whatever to all the characters?
I realize this may be covered somewhere on the site, but I’m willing to bet I wouldn’t recognize it for what it is.
-Ron T.
Question! I followed your direcdtions to the letter 5 times but when I get to the custom shape in Blender 2.61 I get my knuckle control at the orginal orentation, before flipping and it refuses to sacale with me. What am I doing wrong?
oh, never mind, I realized,I had to do the rotation and stuff to the bone meshes in EDIT mode. Whoops, Silly me
One Question: At 18:25 you say that you hit coma on the keyboard to rotate the bones around their individual centers – this doesnt work for me, also when pressing R and coma, the bones always rotate and the roll is messed up.
How are the bones rotated around their individual centers?
Excellent tutorial, thanks! I’ve been intimidated by the texture paint feature but after going through this tutorial I feel much more confident about using it!
Can someone please help me! I dont know what happened, but im on the part with the bones, and everything is like, locked on the axis. So when i go to tilt it down, it just follows the axis and grows.
This tutorial is awesome! I never knew how to add custom bone shapes and it has made things SO easier for me!
One dumb question.
I make the knuckle in the third layer and when I change the bone to the knuckle shape.
It comes out laying on it’s side no matter which way the original is orientated.