I have an image in my head which I really need to get into Carrara and I needed a creepy hand. I decided that the spline modeler just wasn't up to the task of whacking out a hand with the kind of detail that I wanted (please remember that the Vertex Modeler (VM) is not my forte at all. So I banged out the simple hand mesh in about two hours and turned on the subdivision modeler and my jaw dropped! The mesh may be a snap for some of you but believe me when I say that it was a significant amount of teeth grinding!!! BTW, my wife thought it was very weird for me to have my hand held up to the screen for a couple of hours! Well let's be honest, the hand is worthless without those stilleto finger nails so I whipped those out in the spline modeler. I spent the next two nights growling at the bone stuff but I totally get it now and look at the results! The bone stuff is explained in the manual in a very clumsy manner but I looked at cckens facial tutorial and cruised through the threads here in the forum and voila! It was a little trick for me to figure out how to get those nails to stay hooked to the hand but I got it. I'm still totally confused about the IK because I can't get it to take a ball joint and keep it (keeps saying it's nothing every time I open the dialogue) but I wrangled it out anyway! -Kix

Wow! That's really terrific looking. Tell your wife to be glad that you are holding your hand up to the screen; you could be doing something really weird like pretending you have eyestalks growing out of your head and trying to figure out how those move. Like someone, um, I know. (Apparently, it's actually pretty common for animators and illustrators to act out stuff. We, um, I mean, You, are not alone.)

Well I did run into a snaffu. I can't duplicate the hand/bone combination! I put the hand/bone into the browser and pulled it back in. I did get a hand (un bent) and the skeleton but they were no longer attached. It's a little bit of work to attach the skeleton and I'd really like to know if there's an easy way to duplicate this hand! Help! -Kix

Nice stuff !!! :)

Not being able to put the hand up in the browser and then bring it down again also means I can't transport it to another file. Am I missing something or is this a bug? -Kix

Isn't this something to do with the fact that you can't duplicate/copy/paste an object once it has a skeleton attached? Dragging an object to the browser must be like copying and pasting and C detaches the skeleton automatically. [I tried saving a boned object file to a new folder, loading that folder into the browser and then dragging the object into a new file but that really messed things up.] The simplest work-around appears to be: i) Drag your object with its bones attached to the browser. ii) Drag browser object to the sequencer of a new file and immediately attach the skeleton. Then position where you want. iii)To duplicate with symmetry, detach bones then duplicate the object, then the skeleton. Select the new object and skeleton together and attach. Hope this helps. Great hand!

Basically I think we're saying that you can't duplicate an object that has a skeleton without wading through the work of re-attaching it all again? Bummer. I did it once, I can do it again! -Kix

It shouldn't take long - you can select the whole skeleton group and attach that to the whole hand so it only needs to be done once. But... I've been experimenting. I used the spooky file on the content CD and from that I added a copy of spooky to my browser. I dragged this into a new file. It seems that if you drag a boned object from the browser and then attach the skeleton immediately while both groups are selected it doesn't attach properly. You can select spooky and move him away from his skeleton as in my pic. The solution seems to be to select all spooky's body parts by shift-clicking, leaving the group unchecked, then shift-click to select the skeleton group. Then attach the skeleton and all works as it should - spooky can't be moved separately from his bones.

Kix, you said : "you can't duplicate an object that has a skeleton without wading through the work of re-attaching it all again" Does that mean you have to redo all the influence work ??? Ouch !

You have to redo the influences. Attaching is easy, it's the influences that are the work. -Kix

Instead of using the browser, importing a .car file of the boned object into a new file seems to work ok (the influences are still in place). You just need to make sure that you've done all the work in the original file because if you detach the skeleton everything is lost. So you can't duplicate for the other hand without re-doing the influences. Regards, Mark

My tips with bones. Don't use any joint besides custom, really ball joints are limited because you can ONLY rotate and every joint in the human body can move slightly more then its associated name. And custom joints give you a lot more precise control. As to the whole browser etc. problem tell Eovia, I'm sure they'll add it to the TO-DO list. Brian