To get rid of that new triangle it created in that space, I’m going to collapse an edge. The one I collapse is the one between the triangle and the five sided polygon.
I feel the edges going down the thumb part of the palm are too wide still. Again, we’re looking for more square shaped faces if you don’t want to see ripples in our geometry when we smooth. So I’m going to cut in a new edge here.
Here I’m cutting and redirecting the edges from around the thumb and up the fingers. The edges coming down the thumb going across the palm.
So stepping back and look at what we have so far we can start to see what we need to do still.
Honestly, this is still rubbish to my standards. Maybe not so bad for something low poly, but it lacks detail in form. Even if we didn’t cut in any more geometry we could mange the geometry better. So we’ve still got some work to do here. The fingers are still pretty blocky at this point so I’m going to go turn my attention back to them.
I’ve decided after looking at my own hand that the webbing up the index finger goes too far. My hand it doesn’t really go past the first knuckle, so I’m going to pull it back a little, as well add a couple edge loops for that segment of finger.
A note on rigging joints. The guide for making joints that will deform well are you need three edges. Three edges will define a single curve. And three edges will hold a shape through deformation. At the knuckle, with three loops to define it we have two faces on the inside of those edges and then the faces outside of them. So say we’re looking at your knuckle and we draw a line right down the center of it and a little to each side of it. As you bend your finger the edges on the outside hold and keep the shape of the segments of your fingers. The faces between those edges deform and bend while the faces outside don’t really. I’m just kind of breezing over this since this isn’t a rigging tutorial, but when ever you are rigging for animation it’s important to understand these concepts so you build a functioning machine rather than just some pretty art work that can’t move.
