Puppet Updates 4 - Hands
Handy Man
Today’s blog is about a big change I’m making to my puppets. The hands are an important part of a character’s design and similar to the face, will be used and seen a lot. It’s important to get them looking and working correctly for this reason. I’ve been unhappy with the look of the puppet hands for a few years now. There are 3 main reasons why:
They did not look as nice as I had wanted them to look.
They were very limited in function.
The way in which they were build allowed for individual finger movements, but the rigging was cumbersome.
These issues have built up for long enough and it was time to make a change that I would be happy with. In fact, the initial idea of a redesign for the puppets came from me not liking the hands so much that I wanted to fix them.
Who knew such a big project would spiral from such a small aversion?
The road to remaking these assets have been very rough. One of the biggest issues that I’ve yet to work out (due to not hitting this specific phase yet), is how to rebuild them in Toonboom and to do so in a way that makes sense and is easier to use. Another rigging issue is that the hand gets cut off in a weird way, making it difficult to use in some angles and with specific hand swaps like fists. That’s going to take some time to get right but I’m hoping to get started on the rigging process in the summer.
Along with the rigging fixes, there is one major rigging addition I’ll be adding. Fortunately this is a small change in terms of the rigging process. Simply, I’d like to have a dedicated traditional animation layer for the hands. I don’t always want to think about how to break a hand down to work in the current rig, and if I wanted to do a quick illustration in the current layers, there would be visual problems. So I want to make it possible to draw hands and add them to a scene quickly without worrying about the other stuff. Currently, I have a similar set up for the arms and legs (yet to be used do to focusing on other things). This should bring a whole new level of creativity and flexibility to the process that I’m very excited for.
Lastly, working on the visuals for the hands was a long process. It took about 2-3 weeks of designing them, and another 2 weeks to match all of the pre-existing frames I’ve made over the years. The major goal was working on visual consistency and practicality. There are moments where I would want the hand to interact with the face of a character, but the fingers made the animation awkward, or stiff. This probably doesn’t bother anyone but me, but they’re not making the puppets, I am. That being said, I really, really love the new hand design. I feel like I could be far more expressive with this new design, and when it’s time to draw new hands I think I’ll have more options to draw from.
This has been a long and grueling process so far, but after I finished making these new hand frames, I got really excited. It was nice to see it all coming together while being easier to draw and making more sense for the character design. I’m very excited to see how the rest of the changes build upon this more solid foundation.
-Until next time-
