Original subtitles

- [Instructor] In this video,

we are going to talk about one of my favorite part

on any character.

Hands are super important and too often overlooked.

And you can often identify a big inner work

just by watching the hand posing.

The first main issue is to keep the rest pose of most rigs.

Most of the time for technical purpose,

most character rigs have flat hand

whenever they are in rest pose.

And to get such a flat hand pose, you need tension,

meaning that you need to straighten your fingers

so that you're not relaxed.

So the first thing I would suggest you to do

whenever you are posing your character,

but whatever the rig you are using,

is to slightly curve the end using the palm controller,

and then to slightly bend the tip of the finger.

Here, you can see a reference picture of a relaxed hand

and there is no flat shape.

Another thing that is very interesting is finger grouping.

Most of the time, fingers tend to group themself

by two or by three.

The current pose is the one I use the most

with the index and the pinky being separated,

and the middle finger and the ring finger being grouped.

If you watch some of my animation,

you can see that I use it a lot.

Whenever I'm posing hand, this is my go to shape,

but you can group the middle, ring, and pinky together

or you can not leave the pinky alone,

but you should avoid creating two groups,

one with the index and the middle finger,

the other with the ring finger and the pinky.

While it may fit for a ninja turtle,

this is not a very natural hand pose.

Whenever you are building a fist pose,

don't just rotate the root of the fingers,

and then curve them inward.

If you do so, you will end up with a very squared fist.

We have flat surface on top of the hand

on the front of the hand, and on the inward.

This will look very low poly like or old game fashioned.

While if you look to a closed fist reference,

you can see that there is a lot of curvaturing.

So a good practice whenever you're posing a fist

is to do the same thing as when you're posing a rest hand.

First of all, think of using the palm controller

to slightly bend or curve the whole fist.

Then watch your own fist.

Watch the relationship between each finger

and the overall shape.

Don't hesitate to play with the location of the bone.

It's very odd to get a convincing fist

with all the compression by using only the rotation.

Again, remember that we are currently sculpting the pose,

shaping our character.

This is not about getting logical,

about all the bones should behave

in the body of our character.

We are not manipulating bones,

we are manipulating controllers.

So again, watch reference, use your own fist,

and try to match it.

Here is the result whenever I'm using my own fist.

Note that the fist position might vary a lot

from people to people

and that you will meet limitation due to the current rig.

I personally believe that hands are so expressive

that they can be considered as being a separated character

within the character.

When you are posing a hand, just act it.

Why we have been focusing on motion,

line affection, and all this kind of thing,

this course is about animation.

So bringing your character to life.

And I do believe that even in an action pose

or an action animation,

hands can communicate a lot about your character,

about his personality.

So whenever you are walking on hands,

treat yourself as a child and play with them.

Just remember whatever you were doing

whenever you were mimicking a monster when you were a child.

Hand poses are written into our subconscious

because it's a strong point of attraction on a character.

They can be very feminine for example

or they can show anger or the envy of an evil character.

So whatever the tension, the shape you build with the hands,

they will communicate something.

Finally, whenever you are posing your hand,

you have to think about the limitation.

While we can break those boundaries

whenever we are playing with exaggeration,

it's always better to build your poses

on the current limitation of the body.

Remember that the side to side motion of the wrist

is pretty limited, just a few degrees of rotation.

Again, use your own hand to test it.

If you hold your arms straight forward,

you can almost twist your hand by 180 degrees

with your palm pointing to the sky.

While if you twist your hand inward,

you will hardly get over 90 degrees.

Regarding the back and forth tilting of the hand,

you should be able to reach a 90 degrees angle

whether you are bending your hand inward or outward.

So whenever you are building those pose, try them yourself.

If it's become painful,

then you have to compensate

whether with the shoulder or the elbow.

Fingers also have their limitation.

While the thumb is pretty flexible,

you will reach a limitation

whenever you're trying to spread it as far as possible

til it creates an L shape with the index finger.

The index and the pinky can process free rotation

with a lot of limitation.

So you can rotate a bit with them

to create a circular shape,

but they are mainly able to curl.

The middle finger and the ring finger are more limited.

Finally, when it comes to the next joint on your finger,

they can only curve and rotating them along any other access

will look very weird.

Again, it doesn't mean you can't rotate them this way.

And I do it a lot whenever I'm building smears,

but if you hold a pose this way,

the finger will look broken.

Finally, depending on the people,

the finger might be more or less flexible

and you can totally bend them backward a bit,

especially if they are applying any pressure.

This will mark the end of this video,

but I do advise you to have a look

to the talk of Hjalti Hjalmarsson at the Blender Conference.

It's one of the best talk about hand posing I've ever seen

and it's really eye opening.

You will find the link in the documentation as usual.