Player Pascal - Progress log #03
Lets do a show of hands, who here loves doing Fingerguns? 👈🐨
If we check the same reference from the previous post, we see that there are a few ways to tackle these blocky fists.
Some people give them fingers, others leave the arms with blocky nubs, just like the official Mojang trailers, others swap models between shots to keep a certain simple look.
Since Pascal is not quite a Minecraft character, being a big lanky blue furry dude and all, so I figured to give him hands and fingers to feel the world with.
Using "Revenge" by CaptainSparklez as a baseline, who in turn used a model by BootstrapBuckaroo, I broke down how the hands might work in this blocky fashion.
One downside: the Usher model only uses fists and fingerpoints and the Player character only really uses their hands with the camera in awkward or obscured angles, making it hard to figure out how the other fingers might move around.
At this point, I figured the best way to tackle the blockout would be to voxel the base shapes together. Basically just 3D pixelart, to see how the fingers move and what the common angles would be.
After blocking out the basic shape for the finger positions, I whipped up some Shape Keys like I did for the elbow joints in my last post, and made a basic control rig.
The idea is simple: move the circle between Z = 0 and Z = 1 and let the Driver handle the math. (listed to the left of the circle)
I kind of like the snappy changes the third option gives me, where the value pops over from 0 to 1 and the finger just >appears< from the fist. This may change in the future if there are more finger positions I need to account for, but works for now.
So far, the only really tricky part would be the movement of the thumb.
While your fingers are very limited in their movement, basically just curling and uncurling when moving in a very basic manner, the thumbs base joint is not where most people would expect.
As you can see, the thumb is also 3 joints long, while only 2 joints are clearly visible when glancing at your hand.
In 3 dimensions, it is also positioned in a different angle from your other fingers and has a much wider range of movement.
Source image above: Researchgate.net
Constraining the thumb to just one axis, like the rest of the fingers, felt awkward and unnatural. (If that is a good word for a blue blocky 3D anthropomorphic koala).
For now, I left it at just that though, for easy fingerguns.
Once I have a bit more time to revisit the hands, to finish up Pascal`s rig, I will probably make use of a mix of bones, shape keys and drivers to easily animate the hand.
That is all for today, but I`ll be back again with more updates on Player Pascal! 🐨👍
