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On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 7:50 AM, Chris Tipney <chris@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I am looking to create a 'simple' 3D model of the human wrist and hand in > block form - how detailed and how many verts/tris depends on how ambitious > we get. The model has to move as in response to external commands. Initially > I would be happy for the components to be blocks and cylinders. I might be able to help a little with this, although not with the creation of the initial model as thats not my area. The way i believe you should tackle this is known as bone rigging/skinning, that is you create a bone structure that represents the hand and wrist, usually this is in a default pose. You then create a mesh of the hand that sits directly over that bone structure. Each vertex in the skin is then associated with two (or more) bones and given a weight. Once that is done animation becomes quite straight forward, if you apply bone rotations which rotates a bone WRT its joint to its parent. Everything else at this point should fall out as you cascade bone rotations all the way to the end of the current branch, then you basically apply the skin to the new bone positions weighting the vertexes according to the bones positions and it all works ;-) Blender is fully capable of doing the rigging/skinning and even applying animations to it. I have also implemented the above from scratch when two of us write a full 3d engine from scratch in C# earlier this year, you can see an avatar i rendered here, https://plus.google.com/u/0/101634876834713050493/posts/evU4XTbupp2 The original mesh is based on this http://community.secondlife.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/50633i67CB3AB1FF28C428/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1 and from that you can see the bone structure (and a low rez mesh on top) and lucky mesh was already done i just had to implement the rendering. For my first attempt i did the skinning in the CPU then passed the vertex matrix to openGL, modern games are doing the skinning in shaders on the GPU as they are just better at it. But for a single hand model, thats not very much work to process so i would keep it simple. and oh BTW see this from 40 years ago :-) http://vimeo.com/16292363 (they went on to form Pixar) You might want to consider doing the entire thing in blender rather than making a 3D engine for this, unless that is a requirement/purpose of your project. You could use python plugins in blender to make a control API for your hand. > > I'm hoping that someone has already created one that I could use with > permission since 'creating' the model is not the point of the exercise... Oh, google "blender hand model" and try other variations of that, seem to be loads of tutorials and examples showing how to create fully rigged hand models in blender. > I can (and do) run Linux under VM on my new laptop so I would be interested > to hear more about this option - is this a possibility? yes it should just work. the only thing that might vary is the frame rate, i expect for what you are trying to do it will be fine but as always ymmv. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq