AM - Class 4 / Week 9 - Lecture

Walk-Through: Hands.

Hands poses are as important as facial expressions & eyes when it comes to acting because we always gesture & express our emotions through our hands, in animation a strong hands posing can make a full body pose a lot more dynamic, although they are a bit complicated to animate because of the amount of joints to work with.

What makes a dynamic hand pose is: strength & tension, clear line of action, the feeling of force especially in fingers.

We can find lots of great hand posing references in classic art, whether its a drawing or a sculpture, as well as modern comic books which are packed with strong poses, & of course we can always pose our own hands for reference.

when talking about posing hands you want to go to the most interesting pose possible, and in most cases you don't want to go for an evenly spread fingers hand, you generally want to group the fingers in a way that looks interesting,  whether its the two middle ones together, or the last two, just something to give the hands a bit of life & non symmetry.

Quick notes:

- Hands continues the line of action of the arms & body.

- Even in a primitive blocking phase; you would want to make a nice relaxed hand pose to get a better feeling of the character.

- Rotate the finger joints individually, usually fingers start curling in starting from the pinky followed by the rest of the fingers one by one, & from the tip of the finger, followed by the mid, then the base joint.

- Like the facial expressions, you need to pose the hands according to camera.

- Take your time to finesse the hands when they contact a surface to give it an nice organic feel.

- Use constrains to attach hand to objects, or objects to the hands.

- Avoid rotating the finger joints all at once.

- Avoid over-animating drag, follow thorough, and overlap with the fingers because it will start to look weird.

- Avoid hitting every pose with a hand gesture, it will look to distracting. 

Lastly, for a great inspiration on hands animation, check out this amazing short my one of the mentors at AM Mark oftedal, 

its so Awesome!!  http://splinedoctors.com/movies/4pm.mov