6.4 Fingers

Xpressionist is a big help to animate hands and fingers. The usual way to do so is to either band each joint of each finger individually - that is 12 joints to animate on a simple cartoon hand - or to build IK chains for the fingers and animate the IK goals - which is not very animator friendly since the hands usually are in motion so the goals are hard to grab. What is needed here is a simple controller to control the bending of the finger externally.

The approach shown here uses a simple effector to do so. The setup is very simple. The hand is boned and all bones are named equally "Bone". We have an additional effector called "Controller"

Click the image to get a larger view.

The statement that was used here is simple:

Bone#.Pitch_X = Controller.Pitch_X;

Since the "#" letter will combine all equally named channels to one channel (also refer to the Object Selector section of the manual) we only need one statement to control all twelve joints that need to be bended. Now we can simply animate the effectors X rotation and the hand will open and close. You can refine this setup to your needs - build controls for individual fingers or build controls for whole hand poses and blend them.

Xpressionist 3.5