Beginning the fingers

- Creating the hands for any character can be kind of tricky, we're going to try and do a cartoony hand yet still have it be relatively realistic. In other words, we're going to go ahead and have five fingers. It's going to look and animate just like a normal hand instead of say, a cartoon-y three-fingered or four fingered-hand. We're going to try to do it fairly realistic, but we're also going to try and connect it to the body here. And if I press Alt and click this edge, you can see way down here the number of edges is eight. So, we're going to have to create a hand that has five fingers and can be connected to the arm here with only eight edges. So, we need to keep that in mind as we're creating this. Now let me tab back into object mode, and I believe I need a better reference image than I have here on the hands in this particular drawing. So I think what I'll do is under reference images, I will go ahead and disable the visibility for these two images. Now let's come back in and create some new images for the hand reference. Now I've got a couple of photographs that we're going to use, some that I found out on the internet, and we're just going to use them as a guide. So the first thing let's do is press Shift + A and bring in an empty foreign image. Now if we come over here and select the object data tab right here, we can click open and go search for that image. So here in the reference images, we've got a hand back, and that's not the back view, that may not be the best name for it, that's the top of the hand for the top view, which is the back of the hand, so maybe that wasn't the best name for it, but let's go ahead and bring that in, I'll click open and there it is. So as you can see, it's just an image and we're not going to try and make it realistic, we're just going to use this as a guide. Now that we have that in, to make it a little bit easier to work, I'm going to go ahead and hide the character image right here, or the character object. Let's give this new empty image a name, we'll call it hand top, how's that. And maybe let's take this and pull it down just a bit like this. Okay, so now let's press Shift + A and bring in another empty image, and for this one we'll once again click open and this one we'll use the hand front. We also have an image with the palm here, let me click this button right here so we can see it. We have an image with a palm if you need that, I don't think we'll be using that in this project, but I'll click open and that brings that in. Now let's turn it, I'll press RX 90 and turn it 90 degrees in the x-axis and I'll also pull it back a bit. Now, we have them here it's true, but let's also go over that modeling tab, and over here, if I zoom out a bit, you can see we have this one here in the front view right here, but in the right view we don't have any image set up. So what we actually need to do is go to the top view, I'll hit the 7 key on the numpad, and now we're here in the top view. So now we've got these two images in our modeling layout that'll help us create the hand in the same way we did the body. I do believe though, let me select this one here, and let me go back to that object data tab, the icon has changed because we have an image in there, but for the transparency, I think I'll just take it down to 0.3, and also I'll click this one here and take this down to 0.3 as well, there we go. Now I'll come over here and let's make sure I don't accidentally select one of these and move it around. Let's change the name as well, I'll call this hand front and we'll disable the selectability here, right here, and here so we don't accidentally move it around. All right, I think we are ready to bring in a cylinder, and what we're going to do is just create the middle finger here, and then we're just going to duplicate it for all the other fingers. So let's press Shift + A, bring in a mesh cylinder, and let's zoom out a bit. So we don't really need 32 sides, let me change this to eight right here, and let's take it down so it's quite a bit smaller, let's type in 0.1 meter, and maybe we can type in 0.2 meters there, and we have a cap fill on it, in other words, there's a top and bottom to this cylinder and we don't really need that, we don't need an ngon there, let's just choose nothing, and okay, I think that is what we want. Let's now press R 90 over here in the front view, and let's move it into place. I'll scale it down a bit, move it over, let's scale it in the S, S and X. There we go, and move that forward just a bit. All right and maybe I'll move this up right in here, like this. Okay, so now we have a cylinder that's going to be, at some point in time, our finger. Let's tab into edit mode and press Control + R and let's click and then drag and put an edge right there on the knuckle and maybe another one right down here on this knuckle, and let's tumble around real quick. I'm going to hit the period key to zoom in, and I'll Alt + click this edge to select that edge loop and maybe scale it in just a hair. All right, let's go back to that top view and maybe Alt + click this one and scale it in with the S key just a bit and maybe we can even take this one Alt + click and scale it out just a bit like that. Yeah, something like that. Now let's work on closing up the front of this, right in here. So if I Alt + click this edge right here, hit the period key, that'll zoom it in for me. Let me hit the Z and solid and we need to fill this in here so we have a fingertip. To do that, I'm going to select these two edges and right down here, these two edges like that, and then, let's hit E, S, and Z, and then I can move the mouse and scale these in So I've extruded, and then I'm scaling in the Zs so they come right close to each other right there. Now if we hit the one key to go to vertex mode, let's select two vertices, press Alt + M and choose at center, and we're merging these points together at the center point between the two of them. Alt + M center, there we go. Now let's take these points here and press Alt + M and merge these at the last point selected which will move it out to the edge there. So it's like, this one first and then that one and Alt + M at last. Okay so now we have the tip of the finger, now with that let's go ahead and create the edge to define the finger nail. Go back to the top view with the 7 key and wire frame and let's press Control + R and let's put that edge right there where the fingernail should go. Now I'm going to go back to the layout tab to create the fingernail, just so we can see it a little bit better. So if I tab into edit mode again, what I'm going to do is use these two faces right here to create the fingernail. I think I'm going to take these two points right here and kind of scale them back out just a little bit in the Y, so S and Y scale these out just a little bit so it kind of goes straight. There we go. And then, this face and this face. Now let's hit E, and click, and then I'm going to scale in just a smidge. I'm going to hit S and hold the Shift key down and scale in just a little bit like this. And them I'm going to hit E and extrude down, I'm going to click and pull down just a bit in the z-axis. Then, what I'm going to do is hit E, and this time I'm going to pull up, back, up out of that hole just a bit, and then I'm going to scale out. I'll hit S and scale out just a little bit like that. There we go. And you may wonder why in the world I would do that. It's because once we put a subdivision surface modifier on this it actually kind of works, so let's give it a try. I'm going to go over here to the ads modifier panel, and let's choose subdivision surface. Now I'll take the view up to two, and I'll come over here to object and go to shade smooth, there we go. So now you can see we're beginning to get a little bit of a fingernail shape there. We could probably take this up a little bit more, why don't I pull this up just a little bit more like this. There we go, yeah. And then what let's also do, is take this front part right here and here, yeah that might be a little bit too high, let me pull this down just a little bit like this, and then we'll take those front faces right there, and let's extrude those out. I'll hit E and let's just pull that out like this. There we go, let's see how that works. All right, so now we're beginning to get a little bit more of a fingernail kind of a shape, but now I want to bring this in some, I want to take this edge right here and this edge right here and kind of bring these in just a bit with S and Y, Kind of like that, there we go. And maybe even take this edge and pull it forward some so we get a little bit more of a curve there. There we go. Now we can also come in here and grab this edge, oh maybe just this top one here and drag that forward just a bit. And let's also turn on the edit cage here, let's go click this button so the cage conforms to the subdivided mesh and let's maybe move that back a bit, we could maybe take this and move it down a little bit. All right so there's the beginnings of a finger. In the next video, we'll come in and add a little more detail around the knuckles and here underneath, and then what we'll do is use this one finger to duplicate and create the rest.