📌Learn how to create realistic hands using a base mesh model.
📌This tutorial covers the process of sculpting and shaping the fingers, adjusting the hand's proportions, adding knuckles, sculpting the palm, and creating fingernails.
- Workflow
For today’s class, we’ll be making the hands for our model.
The first thing we want to do is assign the hands their own poly group.
Mask the hand and click Ctrl + W.
Turn on the Line Fill so you can see the polygroups on your model.
The keyboard shortcut for it is Shift + F.
Once we have our new polygroup, mask it and use the Split Masked Points to give the hands their own subtool.
To mask a polygroup, Ctrl + Shift + click on the polygroup to isolate it.
Once isolated hold down Ctrl and click on the side to mask the polygroup afterward hold down Ctrl +Shift then click on the side to reveal the rest of the model.
We can hide the rest of the body and only have the hand subtool visible along with the 3D reference.
Use the Move brush to adjust the position of the hand to fit the reference.
From here grab the Knife tool and slice the hand where only the middle finger is left.
It’s ok if you slice a bit of the thumb.
Next DynaMesh the model to a lower resolution so it is easy to manipulate.
Once DynaMeshed smooth out the hand.
If the finger is too thin, use the Inflate brush to inflate it.
Mask the finger and give it its own polygroup.
Mask the polygroup and Split it into its own subtool using Split Masked Points.
Mask one of the middle fingers on one of the hands and give it a new polygroup.
Ctrl + Shift and click on the polygroup to isolate it then go into Geometry, Modify Topology and click the DelHidden button to delete the other finger.
We only want to work on one hand and then paste it on the other side once we are done.
Holding down Ctrl and moving the finger with the gizmo tool will create a duplicate.
Make the rest of the fingers on the hand except for the thumb and adjust them to the 3D reference using the gizmo tool and the Move brush.
To make things easier we can first create each finger their own polygroup by using the Autogroups option inside the Polygroup options.
We can now isolate and mask fingers we want to move and adjust.
Make sure there is enough space between each finger.
This is to prevent the fingers from sticking to one another when we combine and DynaMesh them.
We can make the thumb by using the Standard brush or Inflate brush to make a basic shape for it and DynaMeshing.
Merge the fingers with the rest of the hand and DynaMesh them on a higher resolution so the fingers don’t merge in between the gaps.
If they are still merging try DynaMeshing on a higher resolution than previous.
Once merged Smooth the hand out.
Adjust the thumb some more using the Move brush making sure the palm isn’t sticking out too much where the gumb is.
We can also fix up the pinkie finger by rotating it a bit and moving it into place with the Move brush.
We’ll start fixing up each finger one by one.
We’ll start with the pointing finger, with the move brush and the Inflate brush make it thinner in size and give it more of a finger shape.
We also need to add bumps on the back of the finger with ClayBuild up to show where the bones and joints are.
The process is the same for each finger, make them thinner using the Inflate and Flatten brush on the side and the Move brush to shape it.
With ClayBuild up sculpt the knuckles at the start of the fingers.
For the pinky, we’re going to make it flatter on the top and give it a better-curved shape.
On the top of the hand add in the lines where the rest of the bones on the hand connect with the fingers, smoothing out after.
On the inside of the palm sculpt the cushions on the end of the fingers using ClayBuild up.
With DamStandard make lines between the cushions to separate them.
DynaMesh and smooth out the palm, adding in more clay to blend in the cushions with the rest of the palm.
If the knuckles are sticking out too much you can move them a bit inward.
Adjust the thumb again and, make the shape more curved and the top surface flat.
On the top of the thumb sculpt in the joint and smooth them out.
Draw out the bones on the top of the hand again because the details get lost when DynaMeshing and Smoothing.
Same with the cushions on the inside of the palm.
The palm in the middle is more hollow and surrounded by the muscles on the hand from the sides.
Add more volume down the pinky and down the thumb while hollowing out the middle part.
We’re also going to go through the cushions again and sculpt the bone in the middle of the wrist.
Afterward, DynaMesh the hand and very lightly smooth the hand so as not to lose the details.
With DamStandard separate the fingers into 3 parts, adding in clay in the middle, focusing more on adding extra volume on the bottom.
Because we added more clay we made the finger thicker than it should be.
With the Move brush adjust the form.
We’re going to do this on all the fingers.
Isolating the polygroup will help you in avoiding other fingers and prevent messing them up by accident.
We’re going to add more clay inside the palm of the hand and go through some of the things we just added to define them more.
We’ll start defining the pointing finger, starting with the joints and working our way toward the rest of the fingers.
With ClayBuild up add a nice amount of clay on top of the joint and connect them with a line of clay where they are separated.
For the nails, we’ll use DamStandard to draw it out and use the Move brush to make it as long as we need to.
Around the nail add more clay because our nails aren’t flat around, they have extra skin surrounding them.
Use a higher resolution on DynaMesh to add more active points so we can put more details in the hand.
For the joints use the DamStandard brush to add gaps on the side to emphasize the bone in the finger.
On top of the joints add the folded-up skin using DamStandar.
In the back of the finger go over the splits again ad aff more clay.
On the knuckles add more clay and connect it with the bone of the hand by adding more clay.
Repeat this on the remaining fingers.
For the other parts of the arm like the wrist, add the bump on the side where the bone sticks out using ClayBuild up and smoothing it.
Below the thumb there is a small hollow are that can be achieved by using DamStandard and slowly carving it out.
For the inside of the palm, we’re also going to use DamStandard to make the folds and signature lines that go across the palm.
After that, we are done and can mirror the hand on the other side of our model.
Bonus - Zremesh Project
- Workflow
To add more details on our model we need more activate points.
We can use DynaMesh and a very high resolution or we can add Divisions.
If we want to add Divisions it will only make things worse since our model has really bad topology because we’ve been using DynaMesh.
To fix this issue we can always Project the details from the bad topology hand to a fixed topology hand.
We’ll start by duplicating the hand, you can work on any of these two hands it doesn’t matter if it’s on the original or not.
Choose one of the hands and ZRemesh it.
Our hand will now have better topology but all of the details are going to be gone.
This isn’t bad at all since we will be transferring the details front the DynaMeshed hand onto our new one.
Add a good amount of Divisions on the Zremeshed hand to where you reach a high Active point count.
We want to have either equal or more Active Points than the DynaMeshed hand so the details will transfer better.
The next step is to Project the details.
In future projects make sure that only the two meshes you want to project details from are the only ones visible.
Another note is to have the Zremeshed hand Selected when you do the projection.
In the Subtool menu there is a Project button, click it and wait for a couple of seconds.
Once the bar has loaded the details from the DynaMeshed hand will be transferred to our Zremeshed hand.
From here we can continue adding more high-resolution details to our model.