Blocking In - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 41

❶ ❷ ❸ ❹ ❺

❻ ❼ ❽ ❾ ❿

Figure 4-20: Creating the hand

To reduce the number of faces along the top
side of the hand (where it will eventually join with
the arm), I merged the two pairs of edges on the
top corner of the hand opposite the thumb ❹ .
(Remember I was aiming to have eight vertices to
join with the arm, so this area needed to be kept
simple.)
For the thumb, I extruded out twice from the
faces on the front of the hand ❺ and then merged
the vertices on the corner to create a bend ❻ . I then
added a loop cut running around the outside of the
hand ❼ , extruded the fingers and the thumb ❽ ,
and smoothed them slightly (W 4 Smooth). Next, I
gave the fingers and thumb a bit of a curl inward by
selecting and first rotating the whole finger, then
the last two-thirds, and then just the tip ❾ . I also
adjusted the shape of the whole hand by selecting
parts of the hand from the top view and rotating
them with proportional editing turned on to give
the palm and thumb a slight curve.
I smoothed the hand slightly (W 4 Smooth)
to make the fingers and palm a bit less blocky. By
selecting the surface of the palm, and with propor-
tional editing turned on, I inflated it slightly ( alt -S)
to give the hand a bit more volume ❿ . This com-
pletes the modeling stages shown in Figure 4-20.
To connect the hand to the arm (Figure 4-21), I
deleted the four faces in the middle of the top side
of the hand, moved the hand into place, and then

joined the hand with the main body in Object mode
( ctrl -J). Then in Edit mode, I deleted the corre-
sponding faces at the end of the arm and bridged
the loops to connect the hand to the arm.
Because I kept the number of vertices around
the end of the arm and the wrist the same, the hand
joined to the arm with a minimum of fuss, as shown
in Figure 4-21. Because the join now had two edge

Figure 4-21: Joining the hand to the arm