How-to: Hand Retopology for Animation

sketchfab

This project is a part of a series where I retopologize a head (https://skfb.ly/6YSK9) as well as an entire character (https://skfb.ly/6YWsM) I can only have a max of 5 annotations so I tried to make them useful, each has a timestamp for where it is applicable. The colors on the final step are where I’ve highlighted the different loops related the hand. Follow these steps and you will end up with a model which should be quite effective to rig and animate! Hands are weird. There are like, 30 ways to retopologize a hand but this is the way I tend to do so. A tip: As I do, start from the fingers and work to the wrist. The fingers are most dense and you progressively reduce the number of loops until you can match the wrist. A note: every studio and every character artist may have their own biases. I did research and experimentation to come up with what you see here.