Any recommendations for controlling fingers?

[dgoyette]

I find that Slate is really powerful in cases where I either simply have a model play an animation clip, or I can easily control things simply by animation their position and rotation. But things get a lot trickier as soon as I want to control the “hands” of a character. I can use Slate’s IK (or various other IK solutions, like Final IK) to get the hand position and rotation where I want it. But when it comes to finger control, it gets complicated. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations.

Let’s say I want to make a simple cutscene where a character walks over to a bookshelf and takes a book off the shelf. Moving the character is easy. Animating the character as the whole is simple. (I’d use a Walk animation, followed by an Idle animation when they reach the bookshelf). Raising the hand to the book is easy, just using an IK clip to position the hand. But now the fingers need to switch to a “pinching” state to grab the book. Or what if it wasn’t a book, it was a sphere, or a small cube, or any number of shapes. Each would require different fine-tuning of the fingers.

So far, the way I’ve approached this is to create separate animation clips for various hand positions. I then add an extra Animation track to my cutscene, and mask it to include only the hands. That’s more or less okay, but I was just wondering if there was something else I was missing that would mean I can do more within the Slate window, rather than going off to create one-off animations clips for all the things a hand might do.

I was wondering what others are doing to fine-tune finger control in their cutscenes?

[Gavalakis]

Hello again!

Creating a separate animation clip for the fingers is certainly one way to do it.

Probably a better solution would be to create a custom animation clip for animating your character fingers (with controls similar to how a 3D Animation Rig would be for such a task). Unfortunately such a clip does not exist since it may (or may not be) something project/character specific and as such while I could create such a clip for fingers animation, it may not work in all cases. I will give it a try though and see if I can come up with something working at least in most use cases. That is an interesting suggestion 🙂

Thanks!

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