Adding finger joints and face bones to six Blender bodies

The six race bodies (human, elf, dwarf, goblin, orc, lizard) now have hands that open flat and close to a fist, and eleven heads have new brow, lid and lip bones. I also gave the same hands to the orcoid orc and two of the meat monsters, and moved the old orc out of the repository. The heads and hands work isn’t finished: the hand and face controls in the viewer and the armor phase are still ahead.

41 seconds in the yard: the six bodies from 5 m and 2 m, the one-handed swing with the jaw opening on the blow, the death, the orc’s four ways of walking and the lizard from behind.

How do fingers open and shut on a generated hand?

Before this a hand was one curl bone, so it could only be a fist or nearly one. I told the agents to add whatever bones were needed for faces and hands that open fully, and to do armor after that.

The kit’s body spec got a switch called phalanges, off by default so nothing built earlier changes. With it on, each finger has three bones and each thumb two. That’s 14 more bones on a four-fingered hand, 11 more on a three-fingered one, and about 15 percent more triangles. The mesh is built and baked in the open pose, so a fist is a bend and not a crushed tube.

Every hand went to a judge agent as a numbered round, and a lot of rounds were rejected. Each fault I saw on the human hand became its own kit switch, with names like thumb_radii, root_in, joint_wide, thumb_built, bake_open and ring_fit. I tried them one at a time on the human, then as a set on all six races. The agreed numbers live in one table, with a starting set for four fingers and another for three. The lizard took two rounds and I accepted it with two known faults, a shallow dip at the index root from the side and some angles on the outer finger from behind.

To make sure a hand change couldn’t move a body, six agreed bodies were pinned, and a check rebuilt them and compared the files byte for byte.

Why did the dwarf head fail all his hair?

I rebuilt the dwarf head with more neck, so the skull sat 25 mm higher in the head’s frame. All 13 hairs and beards that already existed failed the fit check, the worst one by 17.8 mm under the skin in every pose. My rule is that a new head changes to fit the hair, so I picked from three options: keep the head’s origin at the old cut, rebuild the hair, or move the cut back. I kept the origin.

Three rows of dwarf heads, each shown from the front, the side and above. On the old heads the gray hair and beard sit snug on the skull. On the new heads the same hair floats and leaves bare skin showing on top. — Installed dwarf hair on the old head (left of each pair) and the new head (right). The new skull stands about 25 mm higher.

The head model now takes an origin. For the dwarf it sits at the old cut, 0.32, while the neck stub still ends at 0.45. The body’s neck socket moved 29 mm up the neck to match. The head sits on the body exactly as I’d approved it, and the hair finds the skull where it was built. The worst sink went from 17.8 mm under to 4.6 mm off. The other five races came out as the same files.

Two rows of the same dwarf neck and seam from front, three-quarter, side and back, plus the whole body, looking nearly identical. — Row A is the head as I’d approved it, row B has the origin kept at the old cut. They’re a few pixels apart.

Two small problems were left. The bob hairstyle lifted out of the forehead on a brow raise, in 6 of 354 poses and up to 7.3 mm. The chin beard pushed into the chest in 28 poses of the vat idle, up to 6.4 mm. I accepted both. A ruling table now records exactly what I was shown, down to the clip, the pose count and the millimeters, and anything outside that row still fails. I did the same for the human’s bob, which lifted 2.1 mm in one pose. The lizard also got a claw on every finger. The 0.018 claws sat inside its thick fingertips and only the thumb’s showed, so they’re 0.028 now.

Three dwarves with the new head 01 and three of the dwarf hairs and beards, turned once round.

Can the monsters have the same hands?

The orcoids and the meat monsters share the kit’s hand code, but without the phalanges switch none of the lessons reached them. I moved the hand values into one file so the races and the monsters read the same numbers, turned the switch on for the orcoid orc, the Meat Boy and the Meat Beast, and checked each in Godot against the old one. The orc went from 20 bones to 80 and the Meat Beast from 31 to 77. The orc keeps its fist shut round a longsword. The six race bodies rebuilt through the same code came out byte for byte the same.

Before and now, side by side: the orcoid orc’s hand open and shut, the Meat Boy and Meat Beast hands, and the beast swinging its claws.

Pairs of close-ups of green orc hands and pink meat-monster hands with long claws. The left of each pair has stiff fingers fused in a block, the right has separate fingers that bend at joints. — One hand per pair, one bone per finger on the left and jointed on the right.

The Meat Monster keeps its old hands for now.

Also done

The old orc had its own hand code that shared nothing with the kit. I said to move it and its runt out of the repository into an archive and never update them with any pipeline, and the kit lost its old hand functions. Everything that still named the old orc was changed.
The dwarf’s two ankle holes are gone. The rebuilt body has no open edges there.
A face test that had 22 failures passes now, 119 of 119.