3DS Max Hand Modeling Tutorial Part 1

hello my name is Joe Thornton this is part one in a series of tutorials for modeling a realistic human hand in 3ds Max 2012 here we have the finished hand or a finish hand from the results of my process and you can see here that it's got the really friendly edge loops for animation it's pretty low detail right now so this is perfectly ready for a video game or you can simply just go ahead and add a turbosmooth as I have in the modifier stack over here if I just turn on my turbosmooth we can see here that the mesh smooth down really easily and puts all the edge loops in the correct positions so that you could rig this an animate later or add medium to higher frequency detail as you wish and get a much better result while maintaining the base structure which is as I said incredibly friendly for character rigging so let's go ahead and get started I'm going to go ahead and reset my scene and I'm going to show you the steps that I took to get there so let's go the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make the top viewport active and we're going to go into views viewport background or you can hit alt B the keyboard shortcut and we're going to go ahead and load a background image that we're going to use is modeling reference for this project so I'm just going to navigate to my directory where I have my file stored and I'm going to grab the image I'm going to click on match bitmap as my aspect ratio and lock the pan and zoom and now I can go right ahead my image is going to show up and it's going to be locked to my background at this point to make things a little bit easier to see I'm going to go ahead and turn the grids off in all my viewports this will help us get modeling and help you guys watching this on youtube so you can see everything a little bit more clearly so now that we have our reference image and input it let's go ahead and create a simple box so I'm just gonna create a box I'm gonna use my top viewport and make it about the width of the wrist in the image and then I'm gonna make it about half as high as it is why roughly and then I'm gonna go ahead and accept the results and then I'm going to right click to get out of box creation mode now that I've done that I have my starting point for my model so I just hit the Z key to zoom the box at this point I want to change the color of the box once again to make this easy for you guys to see and follow along and let's get going alright so we have our box and at this point it's just a box we're going to go ahead and start subdividing this thing to to basically start generating what is the basis of the hand so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to the modifier stack and I'm going to right click and I'm going to say convert this box to an editable poly now that the box is in editable poly we have access to all our sub object modifiers such as vertex edge border polygon and element for this tutorial we're going to focus on vertex edge and polygons mainly so let's first go ahead and click on vertex and let's just go ahead and go into the orthographic view port in the top and I'm gonna marquee drag to select all the vertices simultaneously so if I can illustrate that here and the perspective you can see here that I mark he dragged around my box and I've selected both the top and bottom vertices simultaneously so that's very important to note because some of you guys might try to just pick one of the and you start manipulating it and then all sudden you'll say why does my box why do I have two edges here when in your video you only have one and the reason for that is because I'm marquee drag to select both vertices and I'm gonna pull them simultaneously so let's just go ahead and do that marquee drag marquee drag pull this well this looks good I'm just lining it up if you'll notice too the dimensions of the gray here which represents the flesh for the wrists and then I'm lining it up on basically with a break here between the wrist bone and the I don't actually know what that bone is called but those two bones there actually don't even know if that's called the wrist bone I'm gonna call it the wrist bone for fun alright so let's go ahead and start extruding this box to get some more shape so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to click on the polygon I'm gonna select the face at the front of my hand and then I'm gonna go ahead and hover my mouse over this little the panel here on the side and if you'll notice I get these two little arrows here and what that allows me to do is drag this panel out so I can basically see all my modifiers without having to scroll through the list which can be very tedious in 3ds max so what I like to do is just pull these out so that I can see everything that all the sub-object modifiers I have available to me while I'm working it just really speeds things up and makes things a little bit easier to work so we're gonna go ahead and select the face at the front of the wrist so this face right here right there and we're gonna go ahead and extrude I also like to use the extrude settings so that I can preview my extrude before I actually have to accept them so you can see here I can drag this thing around and preview everything and get it exactly the way I want before I go ahead and come into it and that can be very important if you've ever used the extrude tool in the interface and you click wrong and then suddenly your changes are committed you have to do it and undo to get out of it and then do it again and in this way you can always preview it you can keep yourself from doing the undo operation so what I've done is I've extruded that face I'm gonna hit f4 in the perspective viewport so that we can see the wireframe on shaded and I'm just going to extrude that face out to match up with the front of the metacarpal bones here in the hand and I like that position so I'm going to go ahead and say green arrow check for commit and I'm gonna accept it I'm going to go into vertex mode again and I'm gonna marquee drag again selecting both top and bottom vertices simultaneously and I'm just going to kind of pull these verts to put them roughly in a position that I like which is it's not going to be quite over these sets of bones here because I'm going to be able to add an edge later that's going to do that for me for right now I like that position so I'm going to go ahead and accept that then I'm going to go ahead and go into the polygon mode one more time and I'm going to extrude this one more time so let's go ahead and do it again using the settings so that I can dial it in before I commit it I like that so I'm and accept it I'm going to go to vertex mode and I'm going to just go ahead and pull these verts to kind of be about halfway down the middle of the metacarpals here and then I'm going to pull this one in so it kind of matches up with the general outline of the flesh which is to note it in the dark gray here on my reference image so then I'm going to go ahead and go into the polygon mode one more time and I'm going to extrude it one more time I like that so I'm just going to go ahead and accept it I'm gonna then go into the top viewport and I'm gonna pull my verts this time to be roughly over the joint here on my pinky which you see right here and the joint here are my index finger so I can actually pull that back a little bit and that looks pretty good okay so we're ready to at this point go ahead and subdivide the box in the length direction so that we can start forming the positions for the fingers and the edge flow for the tendons that run down the hand so let's go ahead and do that I'm going to go ahead and select my first edge here at the front of my what is my very rough hand and then I'm going to select a ring to select the ring of edges all the way around the front and then I'm going to go ahead and use the connect tool to add three edges down the center of my palm here so there we go one two three that looks pretty good I'm going to go ahead and accept it and as you guessed I might go into the top viewport again go to vertex mode and I'm just going to go ahead now in position all my verts starting with the first row and I'm basically just going to have them all kind of straddle the union of these two joints right here just like so and then I'm going to start angling the next rows as I go down so that they just flow with those bones okay we're just gonna do that flowing [Music] down that's pretty good and then when you're gonna just go ahead and pinch these in a little bit because the tendons in your hand actually flowed down the finger bones it'll kind of converge to somewhat not really a point but it just converges a little bit it doesn't fan out the complete width of the wrist so that looks pretty good from the top view anyhow and we've now we still have a box of course but it's starting to represent the hand a little bit better than when we started so let's keep going let's go ahead at this point and we're going to select the side set of edges and I'm just going to select the first one there at the the right of the index finger and I'm going to go ahead and then say ring to select the edges all the way around my low-res cage here for my palm then I'm going to go ahead and connect this time I only want to use one set of edges all the way around and I'm going to say except I like that okay and now we are to position here where we can go ahead and extrude the polygons out that represent the hole or the position where the thumb goes so what I've done here is I've selected the polygons on the right side of my hand let's hover this joint right here and that represents the position for the phone so I'm going to go ahead and just extrude that and these are going to get pretty heavily pulled points so I'm just going to go out and accept the extrude knowing full well that I'm going to go into vertex mode going to my top view and I'm going to position these I want basically so that looks pretty good at this point we can probably bring this guy out a little bit and kind of tighten this one in here a little bit you can always change these later so you know your your vertex positions at at this point in time are gonna get tweaked pretty heavily later so you don't totally have to worry about that you just kind of want to be in the ballpark so okay so I've extruded the the thumb position out warrants I'm gonna go ahead and grab those faces again they're already pre-selected because I've already had them selected and I'm going to go ahead and extrude it one more time so I'm gonna do that I'm gonna accept it go into her text mode going to my top view maximize position looks good okay I'm just profiling that bone right there so I'm gonna go back to my perspective one more time go into polygon mode and I'm going to select those if they weren't selected I can select them and I'm gonna extrude them one more time and I'm gonna accept it and then you guessed it I'm gonna go into vertex mode go into the top view and I'm gonna go ahead and shape these verts to basically straddle the joint they're at the base of the thumbs metacarpal and the phalanges the first phalange so okay actually technically this is probably a funny energy on the thumb I'm not sure what the what the actual anatomy is but basically this bone in the thumb is equivalent to this bone in your finger and it's just kind of hidden so you don't see it and often people will incorrectly model a hand without that and I'll cause problems later when you start rigging the model for for animation so here we go we have now what's looking a little like a glove and at this stage in the game we want to go ahead and start adding some shape to this by pulling points so one thing we can do to make our lives easier when it comes to pulling clearances we can add a smooth modifier to this model which will allow us to pop back and forth between this low resolution cage and a higher resolution smooth version I like to use the turbo Smith so I'm going to go into the modifier stack scroll down to the turbosmooth and you can see here that I've smoothed my geometry it got a little bit more round even though it's still kind of flat and boxy and so you can see that you can go into the editable poly if I turn off vertex mode I go back up to smooth you can see here it'll smooth it not in vertex mode if I ever want to turn the scoot off so that it's not displayed all I have to do is click this little light bulb right here to turn it off so during the rest of the tutorial I'll be popping back and forth between turning the smooth on and off and you should be doing the same at intervals in your work just to see what kind of shape you're getting for your models so let's go back down one more modifier in the stack to that editable poly that we created the first time and let's go into vertex mode and what I'm going to do is I'm going to start right here at the bottom right of the top of my hand and what I'm going to do is I'm just trying to round add some roundness to my model so that I'm kind of removing the boxiness whenever you start off with a box you run the risk and I see it all the time on box modelers portfolios where you can really tell that they're box modelers because often they don't do a good job of getting rid of the boxiness and I want to help you guys not make that same mistake in your modeling so let's go ahead and we're just again we started at the beginning starting here at the base of the wrist and we're going to start moving around and I'm just going to take the basically the edge off of the model starting there and just working my way all the way around to kind of get it to be round like the hand actually is the you know the hand does not look like a box so let's keep doing there and again you know I might get some of these wrong at this point and I'm not too worried about that because I can always change it later and it will change it later so I'm gonna keep going just pong points and I'm gonna avoid the top of the hand because I'm gonna come back to that later so let's go ahead and pull this one down [Music] kind of really be careful when you are pulling points in the 3d view in 3ds max if you are not careful notice how I'm just working actually it's in View mode right now but you can also work in world mode what you want to do though is you kind of want to avoid unless you've mastered it which takes a while to do so you want to avoid moving the vertices in three dimensions simultaneously because you can end up with some really wacky results so what I like to do is just grab the arrows and move them in one axis at a time and then you know that you know you're not going to end up with some some sort of exploited vertex that ends up way off in space and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about once you do it if you do do that and you end up with a point that flies out in no-man's land it's because you try to manipulate it in all three axes at the same time so let's just keep going around now I'm at the bottom I'm gonna work my way around the same way I did at the top holding up whoops pulling it up again what I just did there guys is I accidentally hit control X for expert mode and what that does is that gets rid of all my tools interface if you ever do that it's just control access to get it back and I can see all my tools again which is useful all right so I'm going all the way around the model and just taking that foxy ash off of the forum and you know I wish there was an easier way to do this but when you get into organic forms kind of the pulling points is the way to go there's there might be some you know quick ways to get it to a baseline but when you're getting two finished organic form with all sorts of different nooks and crannies that the only way to get there usually is through just grabbing your verts or edges and pulling them into position like so so I'm gonna keep going we're almost done last Bert laughs Bert's stubborn Bert there we go okay and we've attempted to basically remove the boxiness from at least one edge of our model so let's go ahead and I'm going to zoom hit the z key to zoom extents on my model and I'm gonna go now and turn on the turbo smooth and just take a look at it and see how we're doing so nice I've knocked down that hard edge at least on the top and bottom of the model and now I'm going to take another pass at this in vertex mode and this time I'm going to go ahead and start adding shape to the interior edges and vertices of the model so I'm going to start with the wrist and let's just go ahead and select these two birds here at the center I just want to give my wrist a little bit of a accidentally selected the entire range of edges or vertices so right now I'm selecting one edge control to select another edge occasionally I accidentally hit shift and then it selects the ring and that's not where I want it okay and what I'm trying to do here is I'm just trying to round off the top of the wrist now and for the bottom we're just gonna add a little bit of roundness to that also so I like to just bring this one down and this one down you kind of just look at your own hand on my wrist there is it's not a total concavity but it's a kind of suggested concavity so that it looks something like that and you can just you know if you're modeling in someone else's hand it might not do that so you want to just kind of look at your own wrist or whatever wrist you're using in your reference and model it that way okay so let's keep going and now I want to go to the top of the hand I just did the wrist another thing I want to do is I can always like to do this if you look at your wrist also there's this point where the wrist like somewhat juts up right after the poem hits the hand and it's not that extreme but it's definitely there so I like to do that just remove that entire back set of verts up a little bit slightly okay and then let's go to the top of the hand and let's get a little bit of shape if I look at my hand it's not a complete flat plateau here at the top of the palm so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all the verts in this set in this row set here and I'm just going to move them up slightly just give it a little bit of a variation and that looks pretty good I'm gonna leave the second one alone but what I do want to do is select these verts here control I just shifted in excellent I do that all night and I'm just gonna round the hand out a bit so that it's not again such a flat plateau it's gonna have a little bit more of an organic form and that's gonna really pay dividends as we later start to smooth this thing so when we throw our turbo smooth on it the turbo smooth is gonna be a lot friendlier to us then if I kind of left everything foxy so let's go ahead and grabbing the bottom of the hand I'm kind of just giving it a crease down the center so that it has a just a slight bend to it instead of again a total boxiness boxy form you don't want to overdo this because if you do you when you go to smooth it you'll see immediately that you overdid it but again that's fine because you can always pull it right back out especially when it's super low resolution like it is right now okay so I've got my roundness on the sides I've added some slight roundness to the arc over the top of the hand and then a crease down the center so hopefully when I go ahead and turn on my smooth I'm going to turn on the light bulb and then select the smooth and I'll go back down the stack and I want to turn off vertices so that I can just see the wireframe itself and now when I look at my mesh if I turn off the wireframe you can see here that we're getting a little bit closer to an organic shape and that's what I want alright so looking good looking better right now it just looks like a hacked off boxing glove but I swear it's going to come together here as we keep going

Channel: MrYouTeacher

Views: 105,515

Keywords: 3ds model, tutorials 3d max, modelin3ds model, modeling hand, tutorial 3d max, modeling a hand, 3dmax tutorials, 3dsmax tutorial, 3ds tutorial, 3d; 3d tutorial, 3ds tutorials, 3dsmax tutorials, 3d max tutorial, maya model, 3d max models, 3d tutorials, 3d studio max tutorials, maya tutorials, 3d max tutorials, hand modeling, fast, efficient, hand model, fast efficient hand model, maya, modeling 3d, animation 3d, model 3d, 3d models 3d, autodesk

Id: ksVUhWUcXN0

Length: 26min 9sec (1569 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2012