Basically, the process of making this through box modeling is extremely time consuming, as I need to create “creases” per every finger joint so they deform properly, and there are a lot of joints. I want to know if there’s a workflow to speed things up.
As I said, the engine does not have dual quaternion skinning support, so “preserve volume” is unusable.
I have so often seen those examples where the joints are modeled using triangles so that they do not deform while animated and i never saved an image and searching “modeling hand with triangles for animation” doesn’thelpt either… (i have to look further)
The finger setup seems to be opposite of what I’ve been doing (because I end up with a wide collapsable region inside and not outside).
However, the main question was making a hand quickly, as adjusting vertices one by one is quite time consuming.
Skin Modifier looked like something that could flesh out low poly hand quickly, but unfortunately there’s no control over “tilt” or “rotation” of the edges it generates, and it performs badly when trying to make a centrla node (like hand) with multiple branches (fingers) originating from it.
Wasn’t the problem of distortion of bending quads the key point while not beeing able to use dual quaternions?
The problem of this was widely dicussed on polycount.com i think but most of the ref i had seen seems to be long gone.
One i re-found (but doesn’t have all images anymore) is Low Polygon Joints - What is the best way? (2009). The example on top is an arm but could be applied to fingers as well seems to have a cross section of just four vertices and a triangle on each side for the elbow (but it look like a knee). And it points out the importance of good bone/armature placement.
But anyway, there are always new ways to go.
First it is lack of dual quaternions in the engine, because otherwise I’d be able to use single segment joints. Currenlty I’m inserting quad ring which is wider on inner side of the joint. However, I can somewhat deal with that by inserting quad loops which hopefully are visible on the images I posted.
The second problem is the process being EXTREMELY tedious. I can quickly setup a low poly model from scratch, but the finger modeling is absolutely killing me. Ensuring proper geometry and joint placement requires more time than the rest of the model, and the process is fiddly. So I’m looking for a way to speed up the process. The only thing I can think of is to prepare a hand template, but it won’t really work if I suddenly decide I want a fiend with long fingers or something like that.
So I’m looking for some way to accelerate the process. Some sort of “hand generator” or “low poly generator” and so on. Or maybe there’s right way to do it I am not aware of.
no shortcuts, have to know the way, otherwise you’re going to end up the wrong place