How properly animate hand fingers

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello !

I made a hand fingers (only four) -soon it will be a whole hand- and I want to animate them using pose mode but don’t know how.

I added bones to each finger (the root bone, center one and tip) and i noticed that I can add a rotation limit constraint to them so I added a constraint to tip bones only (adding constraints to other bones caused problems ;|!?)

In real life if you take something in hand the finger is gradually closing on that object -how to do that effect by animating only one bone (moving a tip or root bone causes a move of a whole finger -all bones) ?

I want to use whole hand (now just fingers) in the scene -rotate, move and so on including armature but I did something wrong and when I move a finger its armature stays in place and finger model uses armature options -the effect looks horrible.
Is it wrong parenting ?
***Please explain me step by step how to animate my unfinished hand correctly (examples nicely seen ;))

Here is my .blend file
Hand (dłoń)

2

Not sure what you’re trying to accomplish with that limit rotation constraint. Have you looked at any of the standard hand rigs that are already out there? This one is my favorite: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/05/13/rigging-easy-to-animate-fingers/

3

Ok, this tutoriasl is awesome and extremly simple !!
Thank you a lot :wink:
I didn’t knew animating may be so uncomplicated :expressionless:

:smiley:

4

a copy rotation constraint on all the finger roots targeting the index finger root will make the fingers close at the knuckle. adding a copy rotation constraint to both the middle and tip bone of each finger, targeting the root bone of each finger and the hand will close to a fist with just the movement of the index finger root bone. make sure the offset check box is checked so you can still manipulate each finger and bone individually. and be sure to have your bone roll checked and oriented equally or you may get fingers that rotate backwards