Creating Hand Controls

My main aim for today is to complete the rigging of the hands.

I have been learning about joint orientation because it is important when creating Set driven keys for the hands. The joints are rotated in order to create curls on the fingers.

Here you can see the joint orientation of the hand


I had to change them so that the X was pointing in line with the Middle finger and the Y was pointing towards the Pinky little finger. This is true except the Thumb, which has a different orientation to the other fingers as it acts differently and curves at a different angle to the others.

Once the orientations were done, it was a case of mirroring the rig across the Y axis in order to create the right hand rig quickly. I then added the prefixes to the right and left hands to differentiate the two.

As you can see, there are now both hands with joints:

It was then time to create the controller and Set Driven Keys for the hand.

In order to create the Set Driven Keys, I added different attributes to the hand Control. These were: pinkyCurl. indexCurl, middleCurl, thumbCurl, ringCurl and pinkyCup. All of these had minimum values of 0 and max of 10, whereas the thumbRotX, thumbRotZ and fingerSpread has minimum of -10 and maximum of 10. All had default rest positions of 0.

It was then a case of using Set Driven key to rotate the fingers into their maximum and minimum positions so that they could be keyed ane be able to be animated easily.

Finally the hand was controlled by using the Command editor and linking the hand to the wrist, so it was able to twist and move.

Showing that theSet Driven keys work:

What I have learned just from the hands:

• Joint Orientation
• Set Driven Key