Gimme a Hand

I don’t want to have to animate a hand by hand. So I made this articulated “bone” model. Problem is, it’s a little stiff, and there’s no way to make the white outlines smooth and even. It seems like a nice smooth hand would be easy enough; the problem is when the fingers go in front of each other, as in the making of a fist. Then you need layers, where each part of a digit that obscures any other part is on another layer. This model has 16 layers: one for each “bone” of the fingers, plus a palm that is also warped by the “bones,” albeit not enough.

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Author: Nina Paley

Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.

3 thoughts on “Gimme a Hand”

  1. have you looked into blender’s grease pencil? there the lines of the fingers could be smooth. it would also be very interesting to see how you would use its “2d animation in a 3d space” features. 🙂

  2. And also, the palm can fold lengthwise. The bottom finger joints are below the top of the palm.

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