Maya Hand Modeling Tutorial

A complete walk through for modeling, rigging and animating in Maya


This is a tutorial I created to demonstrate the entire process of modeling, rigging and animating in Maya. To keep things simple, only the hand is modeled although these same techniques can be used to animate an entire character. This tutorial is focused on animating for video games, so the Maya Trax system is used to allow artists to create multiple animations on the same model.

Download the files used in this tutorial.



Blocking in the hand



Connecting the mesh together



Laying out the UVs



Painting the model



Adding a skeleton



Rigging with constraint controls



Curling the fingers with Set Driven Key



Painting bone weights



Creating a character set



Hand wave: A simple Trax animation



Hand grab: A more complex Trax animation




Return to www.kitfox.com