Hand Model
First Attempt
After gathering my references for what I wanted to create and made a few concepts I started to model the hand by finding a hand image on the internet of the top and bottom of a hand I could use as a reference on how to shape the hand. I would only need to create
one hand as unreal engine uses one
hand for their VR game and uses it for both.
I started with a smart cube and began moving the edges and vertices to get a basic shape for the hand. I started to make the thumb of the hand to try and see how it would look not liking it so far.
As can be seen in the image that hand didn’t look the greatest and so I decided I was going to scrap this version of the hand and decided that I was going to restart the hand and attempt it again.
Second Attempt
I attempted to make the hand base shape with an easier shape to extrude and move so I decided I was going to use a square. I added some edge loops for the square one for each finger and extruded it out and traced the shape of the reference below to get the shape of the hand. I quickly got a better-looking hand that I liked the look of so I added some details such as the joints in the fingers and thumb so that when it is animated the animations will work well. I also added some knuckles so that the hand can work with the animations better as well so that it won’t affect the whole hand just the knuckles.
After getting the basic shape of the hand I started to add some more shape to the hand rounding the edges and adding the glove, wrist, and the straps along the glove.
Once I was satisfied, I added some lambert colours just to see how the glove would look when it is finished, and I was satisfied with the look of the glove and how it was looking.
I created the crystals for and their ring holder for the top of the hand that will be used to store the crystals in the game. The player can grab the crystals on the glove and crush them giving them the power of the crystal. There are also 5 different crystals each with different powers.
Next step was making the hand look more hand like instead of flat which in the last image is very clear that hands don’t look like that. I used the UE4 hand as a reference to get the shape of the hand and so that I can use its animations for the hand it should be as close to the UE4 hand as possible, so the animations transfer over well. I plan to retarget the animations over from UE4 to my hand instead of making the animations from scratch to save time and because the animations are already good in unreal and will work for what we need. I moves each of the fingers into ruffly the same location as they are on the UE4 hand and made the hand have better proportions so that it looks more like a hand. I wanted to make sure that the hand would look as close to a actual hand as possible since the player can bring this close to their face.
Crystals and Ring Version 2
While working on the hand I decided to delete the crystals and the ring on top because they no longer fit the style of the hand and made new crystals and a new ring. The ring was made by using a torus and moving the edges. The crystals were created by stretching a cube, merging to centre and I tried using chamber vertex to get the damaged and chipped look on the crystals. I also hardened the edges on the crystals to help the chips and damage stand out more.
Rigging
I started to prepare the hand for Unreal engine by taking the bones from the UE4 hand and putting them into the hand that I had created. To put the bones from the UE4 hand into mind I used the bind skin tool in the rigging tab which allowed my hand to take the bones and use them on my model without having to make a new rig.
Uving
Next, I moved onto the UV and started breaking down the model into areas such as the fingers, wrist, metallic areas, leather straps and the main glove. Once I had all of these ready, I was able to make a simple material that would be used in the game.=
Colouring and Importing
I tested some colours in Maya to determine what I wanted the glove to look like and then I make the colours on photoshop using the same method as Roki to get the colour scheme for the hand. I then imported the hand into unreal engine and added the material to it.
Bibliography https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-front-back-hand-white-background-image62926962
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