Reflective Journal: Week 9 - Hand

I adjusted the body model a little - circularising the arms with help from Oana + slight adjustments to the body, fixing up vertices. Other than the arms needing to be rounded, there weren't really any notable improvements needed, just some comments on the character's wacky proportions (by design).

I've gotten started on the hand (Monday) and have been working quite quickly. I'm roughly following this tutorial on YouTube but simplifying some spots. They use 16 faces along the wrist and I want to keep it to 8 to keep things simpler overall since the arms have 8 sides as well and upping it to 16 would make the body unnecessarily complicated.

End of Monday: I've finished the main form of the hand. I think I might need to add more edge loops across the fingers (along the top and bottoms) to curve them better, and to create more distinct knuckles. This would also make sure the fingers follow the rule of 8.

I'm also meant to make the fingers pointy according to the original character design. I may decide to override this design decision as the character body has been leaning more realistic in its muscle form and so the inhuman pointy fingers might not fit so well.

Also according to Dev, the thumb is attached wrong.

 

Tuesday:

I tilted the thumb and reattached it to the palm but I now have three triangles that I'm trying to clean up. I shifted the top two triangles so that they're near each other (screenshot on the left). There are a few different ways I can connect them to make sure they're all squares but every method I've tried so far makes the topology look quite bad. I don't think there's a clean way to remove the bottom triangle but I think it's in a well hidden spot.

 

Wednesday:

It has been a day and I've realised that I can just merge the vertices to remove the top triangles. 

 

It looks like I'd also accidentally retopologised the hand which had removed some edge loops along the fingers. I added these back in because they're important for creating the proper bends in the fingers.

I've also received feedback from my friend Sol that the thumb is too short especially in relation to the rest of the fingers so I've adjusted that. They also said that the fingers are too long. I'll try adjusting these a bit but I don't think it will matter too much since the character already has really unusual body proportions.

There's also an n-gon here that I might need to fiddle around with.

I added a line to remove both the n-gon and the triangle. I think this works okay.

Final photos of the hand (for now):

 

For the group, I've given them guidance on how to split the vehicle parts up. The plan is to have the main vehicle body made by the end of next week at the latest, ideally earlier, to give us time to work on the details and putting everything together. So for this week, I want them to have about 50-70% of the vehicle body modelled.