The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

I’ve been watching a lot of animation over at The 11 Second Club, and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a common weakness running through a lot of the clips I see. Specifically, I notice it in how characters interact with objects with their hands.

I see a lot of characters bending their fingers around an object that they’re “holding” or placing their hands down loosely on a table, in ways that look very much like all the animator has done is to rotate the fingers around from the original default positions.

I’ve decided to take the LowMan Rig and try just a few quick sketches by way of an example. Hopefully, this will help to illustrate what i’m talking about, and even better, help some beginning animators step up their use of hands–they’re so important!

To start off, here’s a picture of a hand grabbing a pole (or it could be a spear, or bars in a jail cell, or whatever you wish):

Looks alright, doesn’t it? I mean, when you see it, you definitely get the idea that the hand is supposed to be holding onto the pole. But all I’ve done is rotate the fingers in one axis, making them all wrap around the pole. This isn’t really what our fingers do, and thus isn’t what our hands really look like when we actually grab on to something. With a few minor tweaks, rotating some of the fingers in a few more axes, you can come up with this:

See? Now doesn’t that feel a little more solid and natural? I’m not saying it’s the greatest hand pose in the world, but I think it’s definitely an improvement on the first picture.

To make it even more clear, I’ve put together a small .mov of the two poses switching back and forth:

One thing to really take note of is that I had to cheat things a bit because of how the hand’s and fingers’ proportions are:

You can see where the pole is more in the fingers, where it should actually be firmly rooted in the palm. Also, the thumb will tend to be locked to what it’s grabbing, instead of having this bit of empty space in there. But since I am posing to the camera, these little cheats are allowable, and help me build a believable pose. You’ll never notice them unless you see them from the wrong angle–and if I’m a good animator, I’ll make sure you don’t see them from the wrong angle.

Let’s take another example. Here is something like what I typically see when a character places their hand on a table:

The fingers are all bent slightly, again only in one axis. Everything is posed taking very special care that nothing is penetrating the tabletop.

But I notice that when I put my own hand down on a table, and I’m relaxed, I get something a little more like this:

Some of my fingers curl in underneath my hand, and one finger stretches out. Most importantly, the palm is actually resting on the table, taking most of the weight from the body. In the previous hand pose, the palm is hovering above the table–not very believable. This pose took a little longer to get right, since there was a lot of counter-animating of the wrist and the fingers to make sure they all looked like they were in the right place and not penetrating the table. But the time it takes to get a good hand pose will pay off immeasurably in your scene, even if that hand doesn’t move at all.

Here again is a quicktime for comparison:

I’ll restate that I don’t claim these are spectacular poses or anything… but I hope that these samples illustrated that with a little effort, and a little attention to detail, you can add a lot more believability to your scene just by tweaking your hand poses.

I’ve heard that the hands are the second place we look for personality after the face/eyes. So make sure that your hands aren’t just set in the default position, or even slightly rotated versions of the default position. Make them do what you need them to do. Your rig is a computer model, and will feel no pain, discomfort, or anger if you start bending the fingers and wrists all over the place.

Good luck, and happy animating!