Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Rigging the Hand

It’s time to create the rig for Jim’s hand and fingers. The steps are shown in Figure 11.6 and the instructions follow.

1. Create the bones for a single finger and give them intuitive names such as D_finger_3.1 to describe the finger position and the articulation number.

2. Create a bone with its head and tail aligned to the beginning and end of the finger chain; this bone will control the whole finger. At the tip, extrude a new bone that will act as the IK target. Duplicate that target and move it up to be used as the pole for the finger IK. In Edit Mode, make the C_finger_3 bone a child of the hand, and the IK target and pole children of C_finger_3. Apply an IK constraint to the D_finger_3.3 bone and set H_finger_3_ik as the ...