Guild of Writers

Man I'm havin a bit of trouble making a human fist. Not finding any tuts on fists, but there are lots on hands. None are very good. Any ideas? Tricks?

Try googling redacted.
I'm sure you'll get lots of results.

Play nice, Kids --Branan

Now - Now be nice or the Fist will get you....

I just can't resist a pun...

I hope nobody tried my suggestion though.

Maybe a weird suggestion, but I would advise you to draw/sketch a fist first from a few sides. Not necessarily because you're great at drawing(I have no idea whether you are), but simply because that will force you to look really closely to it. And if you make a front, side and top drawing, you could use those in blender to help you.

Good suggestion Luna. I know this is not the normal type of post. I should probably ask this in a blender forum, but I hate blenderartists.com. I forgot my password and have to do like 100 capitcha's to do anything. I've tried many times to get it fixed and something always makes me give up.

The normal way would be to model a hand, then rigging it, and with the help of that rig, animate the hand to build a fist.
Maybe you should try Blender 2.57, it has a ready-to-use build-in rigging system (rigify).
Or have a look at this:
http://www.blendernation.com/2011/05/21 ... for-bipeds


EDIT:
I just gave it a 15-minutes-try. Here's an example of what I got:

(I already had a model, which I rigged some days ago, and just made a fist of the hand now. It still looks a bit ugly, but with spending more time and some tweaking afterwards you should be able to get the result you imagine.)

Here's a shortcut: a fist is two simple objects:
1- a coil starting with the little finger and ending with the thumb (like a fat spring, bigger at the end than at the start);
2- a flattened sphere for the hand

I made an ok hand, but you guys are right it has to rigged to contort it or it rips and skews and such. Tach that hand looks great. Gimmie an idea of what percentage the texture makes the hand. I'm hoping that without the texture that hand would look much more basic. Organics are so difficult for me. Why? What makes them so much harder?

bnewton81 wrote:Gimmie an idea of what percentage the texture makes the hand. I'm hoping that without the texture that hand would look much more basic.

Well, the fist has no texture applied at all. (Okay, it actually has one, but it's only a procedural texture (clouds), scaled way down, to give it this shimmery skin look. No shading in the texture itself.)

Here's the loop flow of the basic model (no subsurf, 1100 faces):

And here's how it looks with subsurf set to 1 (4400 faces):

(Model already tweaked a bit, to compensate for this deformation of the fingers when they got bended by the rig)
And that's the trick. Create the model relatively low-poly, ensure you use only quads, no triangles, and apply a subsurface modifier to make it look more organic and less angled.
4500 Faces should be still okay in URU, if you're not going to place hundreds of such a model in your age, and if it's pretty large, like a statue or monument.

Sidenote:
I made this hand following the Blender Foundation Blenderella DVD made by Angela Guenette, which is such a great example how to model a person the right way.
http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product ... cts_id=133

bnewton81 wrote:Organics are so difficult for me. Why? What makes them so much harder?

Okay. I would say, having studied anatomy will help a lot - but maybe it's a bit overdone. But at least you should ensure your model has a clean topology and a proper loop flow.
To give you an idea what I mean:
http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/02/25 ... view-hand/