Finishing and Refining - Game Character Development with Maya - page 171

At this point, Kila's essentials have been modeled. She now has a face, and the primary
areas of her body have been shaped and adjusted to give her an explicit form. If we require
it, more-precise muscle definition can be achieved with the texture, as can many of the
smaller details. For now, her shape looks good and will deform well.
Delete the history on your geometry and save your work as Kila_Details.mb.
Hands
Hands in a game environment can come in many shapes and sizes. During our research in
Chapter 1 , we discovered that Kila is to have a fully working hand, meaning all the fingers
can be animated separately. If you are at all unsure about the number of fingers your char-
acter should have, talk it through with your lead artist.
Although we already have determined the hands we need for Kila, I will illustrate in this
section how to develop various resolutions for a hand, covering any eventuality. The best
starting point for this task is to build the higher-resolution version and then work down.
If you already have a selection of hands at your disposal, as I do in my Morgue, you can
simplyimportonethat'sappropriate,attachit,andkeepworking.Butlet'ssayyou'restart-
ingfromscratch.You'llneedsomesamplehandimagesthatyoucanimportintoMayaand
useasaguide.Theimage in Figure 3.61 istheonewewilluseasabaseinthisdiscussion.