Final Character Deformation - Game Character Development with Maya - page 882

Many studio's add gloves or long sleeves to their character designs, which can disguise the
twist of the wrist. This usually works well, because the hand is essentially detached from
the arm and the wrist is hidden beneath the sleeve or glove.
The only solution we have is to continue to pose the hand and edit the weights until we
reach a satisfactory result. Solet's leave the wrist as is and look at what we can dowith the
hand and fingers.
Hand Weights
We will skip the main palm area until the fingers are done, since these are more important
to get right. After the main finger weights in place, we can then go in and make any minor
alterations to the palm.
If the geometry making up the fingers doesn't deform correctly, the hands will not work
visually. The best approach is to work on the fingers one at a time.
1. Select the icon for the index finger. Set the Proximal_Pitch, Middle_Pitch, and
Distil_Pitch to 5 .
With a single finger bent, you can now see how the weights have been distributed.
As you can see in Figures 14.15a and 14.15b , the index finger's joints are affect-
ing the middle finger's geometry.
FIGURE 14.15 Paint the individual sections of the finger.
2. Paint the main area of this section of finger so it is fully influenced by the joint
( Figure 14.15c ) , and remove any influence it has over any neighboring fingers. Do
this by reducing Paint Weights Value to 0 for this task.
Then change Value to 0.5 and paint over the vertices that lie down the middle of
the knuckle, making it half influence both sections of the finger.