David, I thought of continuing this discussion here instead of hijaking a thread. So...

Actually I was really thinking of a thumb placement control. The hand cup bone is an anatomicallly necessary control because the hand can take on so many different cup position. But I find it also usefull because most of the TWO characters I had to work with had their hand modeled flat which is unnatural to start with. So for this reason, I always set some cup to my character hands at the start of any animations.

In essence, I use that control to correct some modeling errors. So this gave me the idea that there could also be a controler to place the thumb in its correct pivot position and starting angle. I find most of the TWO characters have their thumb modeled flat in-line with the palm and the pivot right in the middle of the side of the palm. This makes it really difficult to get nice hand gestures and expressions. And we don't want to go and retouch the models themselves because this could break some already done animations. But an added control would allow to reposition the thumbs without breaking existing animations.

I was thinking of moving the thumb bones myself but I found out that the thumb is actually a whole system of bones and relationships. Not easy to do manually. But if this thumb system repositioning was integrated in the hand gizmo, that would solve the problem. But I don't know it it would be easily doable or if this would involve a complex settup. What do you think?

I was thinking a "relaxed" pose would be the easiest way to do it, it wouldn't take very long per character and would save the hassle of correcting the character itself...we could do that if it's preferred, it would just be more work (and might interfere with previously finished animation). That wouldn't interfere with previously finished animation if we set it to "off" as the default. Whether or not to make an overall character "relaxed" pose or just one for the hands is something I was wondering.

One way of making a quick relaxed hand would be to set the hand clench poses higher than "0" (it would depend on the character what would be needed, but probably not more than 20-30%)...those poses move the carpals along with the finger curling (well, they should...that might not be true on all of the characters).

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I checked Woot, setting the clench poses to around 30%, translating a couple of the controllers and moving the thumb into position would probably work fine for him.

I put a "relaxed hands test" version of Woot on SVN, the pose is located in the "Animation_Controls/Hand_Controls" folder and is set to "off" by default. It might need more tweaking.

Hello.

Drag and drop poses have been reintroduced to A:M. I think it'd be best to create rotational keys for behavior, such as natural-looking hand cups, inside a "Helpful Initial Pose." As a matter of routine the animator should drag and drop this helpful pose onto the first frame of his Action file, or the first frame of the primary Choreography Action. (Boilerplate Reminder: Before you drag and drop, make sure the key rotations and key body buttons on the frame toolbar are toggled ON.) This Helpful Intitial Pose could be stored in the Key Groups folder, on the top of the list. This would be a natural place to store it. I think Bob Croucher wants you guys to drag and drop poses with keys activated on them, instead of using David Seymour's original constraint-heavy Key Groups idea.

I don't think messing with thumb bones inside the rig is a wise idea. Models are made with the hands flat for the sake of the riggers. Having the digits lay in a flat plane can help the job of laying in bones, and control bones, and control bones for the control bones, and control bones for the control bones of the control bones, etc.

It is very easy to go insane when rigging hands. Steve Cleary's hand gizmo is brilliantly insane. The hand gizmo is the one part of the Squetch Rig that makes me jealous.

Another reason to use a drag and drop solution: After you've dropped the pose, the rotational data will be inside the Action file. The animator can do something about them if he doesn't like them. If he wants the hand to slap down, with all the digits perfectly straight, the info is right there, in his Action file, ready to be edited or deleted or whatever. If you store attractive body part rotations in an ON/OFF pose, the animator will have to remember where this arcane pose is, if he wants to shut them off. Alternatively the animator could undo the Pose rotation in his current Action file. Both of these solutions are crude.

Here's my thinking. It's great that we can lacquer layers and layers of keys on top of each other, by adding Action files on top of Action files, and Poses on top of Poses. With that power comes a danger, though. If you've got a dozen active poses with rotational keys telling a particular bone how it should rotate, who gets the final say? Can the animator govern the bone in the Action file anymore? To his dismay, the animator discovers that bone rotations are now a committee decision; the vote of his Action file is only one of many. Glitchy behavior can seep in, in this way. The program is actually working perfectly, but it looks like glitchy behavoir.

Action-blending is an art. It is best to use it sparingly. Yeah, I'm guilty of rhetorical exaggeration, here. I plead guilty.

My advice is: Don't even begin to "solve" modelling "problems" by creating ON/OFF poses, which in turn will nibble away at the authority of the animator. If initial rotational key data is located in an intuitive place (such as the first frame of the Action file) then the animator's authority is not undermined.

Sorry for the bloody long post.

Sincerely,

Carl Raillard

You have a strong argument, Carl. I don't have a problem with setting up drag and drop poses...whatever works easiest and best.

Steve's Hand Gizmo is brilliant, he did a great job on it.

I like that all my controlers I may need are in one slider pannel or tab or something like that. I don't need to hunt for the pose, find it, drag and drop it. Drag and Drop is a very usefull concept but not for this "Thumb placement" situation.

Personally, I really don't have a need for a "relaxed" pose. Whatever the starting pose, I will end up changing it anyway so that is not my point. I was really refering to the need to place the thumbs at their right place.

I don't buy the argument that the thumbs were placed the way they were just so the rigger have an easier journey. That would be the reverse. The rigger did place the thumb rig that way because the model was made that way. This have nothing to do with the fundamentals of the hand gizmo per se. This rig would work just as well on a properly modeled hand. And I think the rig could actually correct some flaws on on some models too.

I only had to work with a few charcters yet, Woot, ScareCrow, Ku-Klip and a little of Tin Woodman. Scarecro and Ku-Klip have their thumb placed and oriented in a very awkward way making their hand look unnatural for almost every hand poses imaginable. This can currently only be dealt with through wise choices of hand angles. And some hand poses are just plain impossible to get.

Scarecrow, for example, have its thumb base pivot located near the knuckles of the other fingers. The thumb pivot should start almost at the base of the hand. Ku-Klip have a similar issue too. I will take some screengrabs and come back with illustrations later.

BTW, I think the Hand gizmo is brilliant too. I love using it.

Well, this is my faullt, since I rigged all the bipeds. I can fix this with not to may problems, but it will effect some of the animation already done with some of the characters, maybe for the better. This can not be setup with poses, because the pivot needs to be changed, moving the pivot in a pose will also move the geometry. I guess I didn't do such a good job rigging the models after all.

There's no "fault". Only tweaks. I expect to be tweaking the face poses right up until they're final rendered.

This should be a fairly easy clean up on existing animations. Only where an object is being held should it be necessary. I noticed some issues on Nimmies' thumb holding the axe, so doing this might improve that one at least.

Mark, I don't think you should blame yourself. You took responsibilities and did a colosal and fantastic job given all the models that needed to be rigged. If you blame yourself then I will blame myself too. This sort of job is usually done by a pear of peoples with a reviewing process. If I had reviewed those rigs I would have catched that earlier. But I did not have time to do so at this time. So blame me.

No really, what we need to do is find a solution and work on that. I thought of a solution but if it can be fixed without too many issues then I say let's do it that way.

I took some screen grabs and started adding comments on them. I'll post them probably during the week-end.

We should expect that there will be other issues similar to that one in this project. That is just business as usual. No blames. But we need to identify those issues and work out solutions.

Well, adjusting the rig makes more sense to me, than adding poses or more rigging to fix the problem. I'm assuming animation is not final yet and there will be a final once over, before final render. Another possible solution is smartskin.

I have to agree with Yves, Mark. Everyone involved was up to their eyeballs in work...it just slipped by all of us, me included. We'll get it worked out.

Ouf! I thought I could find the hand charts I was looking for on the Internet but I ended out doing my own. So here is a commented hand chart (or a begining of one). I focused on the thumb, its bones and their relationshop with the other bones of the palm and wrist.

The main point, as far as the thumb is concerned is that the base pivot of the bone is located very near the wrist pivot and right under the line of the index finger.
[attachmentid=21797]

And now the hands of some of the characters. I just indicated the thumb base pivot placement except for Woot and Nimmie where I also indicated the wrist placement because their wrists are currently too far back into the arm. Tin Woodman hand have more issues than just the thumb. And the thumb placement will require the hand to be remodeled So I don't know what to do about that one for now.

I can do the same thing for the other characters is you want.

Updating the thumbs is easy enough, how do you want to fix it , adjust the rig? Not a problem, smartskin? look for someone else, I don't do smartskin. And with this repositioning there will probably need some smartskinning even with weighting. Since the pivot has now moved into the palm of the hand, weighting will not be enough.

I started on Woot's hand last night. I'm moving CP's for the thumbs around, adjusting the bone placement and re-weighting. I'll post a version of it on SVN either very late tonight or early tomorrow morning...I'm not replacing the current Woot yet since this is subject to review. I can't re-model since texturing has been done, but I think I can get everything done without going that far.

I can adjust Tinman's hand if Stian doesn't want to do it.

Cool! Yes. We don't want to remodel at this point. Moving CPs around is OK though.

No. Don't modify Tin Woodman hands for now. We need to identify all the issues and then discuss them and then decide what we want to do with it.

One other issue with Tin Woodman hand is that the finger phalanx are all the same length. This explains some odd hand poses that I have seen in some animations. This would not require remodeling the fingers but just moving CPs around. But the thumb placement would very probably require some remodeling although Tin Woodman hands are not textured per se in the sense that they don't have maps applied to them.

Okay, it's not finished yet...I've got to do some CP Weighting on the left palm and thumb area and I think I might have to slightly change the angle of the rotation of the thumbs, but, I put the partially finished "Woot_hand_fixes_in_progress.mdl" in the SVN folder. The hand that is closest to being finished is the right one, I changed the lengths of sections of the fingers (they are still the same overall length though), moved around the CP's to try to get a decent looking bend, rotated the thumb, moved the necessary bones, adjusted the necessary poses and mostly re-weighted them.

I'll pick it up again tomorrow/tonight, but if there's a problem with the direction I'm heading, let me know. Be sure to check the hand clench poses...I did a little cheating by squashing a few things in those poses.

The "Woot_hand_fixes_in_progress.mdl" now works pretty well, but, I think I really should go back and resize the individual finger bones...while keeping the overall length. I'm still cheating to get a good hand clench by squashing some things...I'll pick it up again tomorrow.

Added a Nick Chopper thumb fix to svn. Can't let David fix all of them. Ives, take a look if you could and if that looks good I'll move onto another.

David, I took a look at Woot hand. Very nice remodeling you've done there. I especially like the changes yopu made to the tip of the fingers. I tested a couple actions with the hand and it looks generally good. Here are some observations and another diagram.

I think the hand clenching issue might have to do with the relative phalanx bone length as you mention. And the thumb base pivot should be moved fackward and downward.
[attachmentid=21919]

Here is a diagram of actual finger bone pivots (Thanks to Arthur Thomson: "A handbook of anatomy for art students" for the underlying finger bones illustration)
[attachmentid=21918]

BTW, The previous hand and thumb diagram was based on a set of illustrations taken from "Artistic Anatomy" by Dr Paul Richer.

Mark, I will now check Nick Choper's hand. Thanks.

I checked Nick Chopper new thumb and tested it in an action. Works great. No further comments to do on the thumbs.

I also checked the Hand Clench pose on both Woot and Nick. I understand Woot clench is a WIP right now and Nick clench was probably not reworked except for the thumb. But There is one important observation I would like to make about the clench pose and I made another diagram to explain it (this time, this is my own hand used as a reference).
[attachmentid=21921]

The most important characteristic of the clenched hand is that the 4 fingers do not fold with the same angle between the metacarp and the first phalanx. The second characteristic is that the fingers tend to fan-in when the fingers are clenched.

Note that this is not critical in the poses because this can be corrected if need be with the individual finger controlers. This is just an observation I wanted to share.

BTW, I notices a pop between the hand clench at 0 and start of hand extension on Nick Chopper. Not critical though.

Thanks for taking a look and posting the diagrams Yves!

I've been doing some measuring and comparing of phalanx lengths so that I have a more accurate representation of a hand. Better to get a system worked out than to just get something that "looks right" to me.