Character Creation - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 142

A quick check of either Google image
search ( http://images.google.com ) or Flickr
( http://www.lickr.com ) shows the way in
which children's hands differ from those
of adults. The fingers are a bit shorter,
the overall hand narrower, and, most sig-
nificantly, softer. The knuckles are less
pronounced, as is any creasing. A trip
into Edit mode on the imported hand
model will fix these problems.

In order to make the hand more childlike,
the following procedures have been done:

1. The entire mesh for the hand is
selected, then scaled slightly along
the x axis to make it more narrow.
2. With the whole mesh still selected, use the Smooth command several times. This will smooth the
creases and deemphasize the knuckles. It will also tend to round the fingertips a bit, which, looking at
the reference images, isn't a bad thing.
3. Figure 6.18 shows the model in Face Select mode, with the four faces on the tips of the fingers selected.
Going into PEF mode and carefully adjusting the falloff circle to end just at the base of the fingers,
the fingers are shortened by G-key moving the selected tips slightly toward the finger bases in a
side view.

Figure 6.17 The default hand object beside a younger version.

The resulting hand looks
much more childlike than the
original, as shown in Figure
6.17 . In fact, these tech-
niques—scaling, smoothing,
and PEF movement and rota-
tion—are the primary tools
you will use to alter imported
character meshes.

Techniques for
Adding Clothes
One of the big mistakes that
people beginning in 3D make
with character work is to
model an entire human form,
then put clothes on top of it.
Unless you're using a cloth Figure 6.18 Selecting the ingertips to shorten the ingers.