MAXON Computer Cinema 4D Tutorials: Boning the Hand

- Hand Project

Hand Project:
Boning the Hand
Download:
PDF / Works with:
CE Requires:
Version 6.0

Special Notes: A great beginning boning tutorial by Chris Broeska. One of our favorite demo artists from Winnepeg, Canada.

Now that you have a hand built you can add bone deformers to control the geometry.

Step 1: The first thing you need to do is add 2 more sub-sections to the joints of your finger with the knife tool. This will facilitate the bone deformer's effect on your geometry. Structure>Knife or right click>Knife. Drag across your finger in points mode to add these sections.

Step 2: Select the bone deformer tool from the deformations menu. This drops a new bone into your scene. Use the Coordinates Manager to postition the bone in your hand. (Be sure you are in object mode.)

The bone deformer, coordinates manager and object mode.

Step 3: Ctrl-click the orange control point and drag out a new bone. Continue ctrl-clicking and dragging until you have all of your bones in place.

Step 4: You can see the opened bone heirarchy in the Object Manager. The bones have been renamed to avoid confusion when animating later (index, index1, index2, etc.).

In the Coordinates Manager, be sure that the bones in the finger are straight. This will help avoid any weird results later on. It's generally a good idea to keep your rotational values positive when dealing with bones.

Polygon mode using live selection. Selected polygons in red.

Step 5: Change to polygon selection mode, use the Live Selection tool to select the polys that make up the tip of the finger surrounding the "index3" bone.

Be sure that the "Only Select Visible Elements" is toggled off in the Active Tool dialog so you can select the entire tip.

Step 6: Now choose Selection>Set Vertex Weight... Accept the default settings and click OK. This will colorize your selected area to illustrate the affected polygons.

Double click the vertex weight icon in your Object Manager to rename this polygon selection set, "index3".

NOTE: Be sure to deselect this icon afterwards. If you don't, when you save your next weighted selection, it will over right the selection currently selected.

The colored result and the vertex weight icon.

Step 7: Selection>Hide selected to hide the current selection. This just makes things easier in your selection process. Select yet another area around the "index2" bone. Selection>Set Vertex Weight... and rename this weighted section "index2". Hide this selection as well.

Step 8: Now repeat these steps for the area around "index1".

Step 9: Normally, you would continue the process with each finger. But we will only do one finger as an example.

Next, select the rest of the polygons in the hand and set a weight for all of them. Call this "index". Choose Selection>Unhide all.

Step 10: Drag and drop your bone hierarchy into your original cube (hand) object. Then in your Object Manager, select the parent bone.

Choose Objects>Fix Bones. Be sure to include all sub-objects.

Step 11: Now apply restriction tags to your bones. To add the Restriction Tag choose File>New Tag>Restriction Tag. Double-click the new tag.

When the dialog pops up, type in the name of the vertex weighted area you designated in steps 6-8. eg: index1, index2, etc. Select the bone "index3".

Step 12: Continue to add restriction tags to each bone and enter the proper name. This will cause the bones to affect only the geometry indicated by the vertex weight tag.

Step 13: As soon as this has been accomplished you can pick a bone and with object mode toggled on, rotate the bone to see the effects of the restriction tags.

There you have it! Bones fingers! More madness to come!