 Thank you. Thank you, Sivran. So, a hand of animation. So, I wanted to do the short amount of time that I have to talk a little bit about hands and how to animate hands, how to pose hands, and whatnot. And I've now created, like, series of talks where it's the something about animation, and I had a problem with the name because this doesn't really fit, but nothing else did. So it's like, and everything sounds a bit awkward and weird when it comes to words that describe hands. But anyway, also, I have a short amount of time. It's gonna have some caveats, so it's just gonna be more about the basics and maybe like little tips and tricks if you want to animate hands. Also, what am I mean by hands? Like the kind of average five-fingered humanoid hands. There's a lot of different ones. Who am I? My name is Hjalti Helmusson, and I've animated a lot of stuff over the years. I'd say probably the like the shot that I've had like the most intricate hand animation now that I look back and I'm actually looking at it. The one at the like bottom left behind me. The one kind of the with Victor has the headphones putting in on and then this shot where he's playing around with a cassette and putting it in. It's probably the most complex little hand animation thing that I've done. Funnily enough, only shot in Cosmos Landermat that has motion blur because it was the first one we did and then we realized, oh, we can't afford all the motion we had. It's too much. So anyway, here's a lot of different hands. These are my coworkers and this is very interesting, the diversity of different types of hands. Like, you know, there's certain things that I can do that somebody else can't do when vice versa. Also just the ratio and the size and whatnot. And I want everybody to have like a little handy tool for your own little demonstration during the talk. So, you know, you can, everybody, if you have at least one hand, you can use it. Otherwise borrow from a neighbor or anything. And I don't be ashamed of like looking at your own head. Yeah, I didn't explain it to my neighbors as I did it. So if you just try, for example, making a fist, everybody does it kind of differently. And I actually, it's kind of alarming to me to see some of the fists that are kind of up there to the left. Where if they were to punch something, they would just immediately break probably the index finger, whatnot. Everybody does it a little bit differently. But I need to be a little bit vague about all of these things and a little bit generic, because I have to go kind of for the average, not the outliers. Also, you have all the different animation styles. And that's where it gets really insane, because kind of, you know, by doing some kind of a cartoon, you're making an abstraction of the idea of a humanoid hand, for example. And they all look very different. My favorite one being at the bottom right, of course, is just the idea of a hand. And that's it, you know, it's super simplified. So, but I have to show something and I have to work with something. So I'm going to go with something you might see, like a style, art style that you might see in something like How to Train Your Dragon or Frozen, something like that. And I'm going to use a character that we've been working on and making at the Blender Animation Studio. And it's, she's called Rain, and she has, like, these are kind of the main, these are the only bones that I'm using right now to animate. And we got, like, three for every finger, and then we got the wrist bone. I'm just kind of throwing that in there. And then I want to put a little bit of an emphasis on those kind of four bones that are inside of the hand. Those get often forgotten by rigors or animators, especially, like, beginning animators. And I want to kind of put an emphasis on it also. So there's the idea of kind of the curve of the hand. Because sometimes you have a modeler or a rigger and they work together and they just make this really, and this is an extreme case, this really flat thing. And it looks super unnatural. And it's not really the way I handle it. And I'm going to throw away the idea of a style. Oh, it's a style. Yeah, throw that away. And because we're kind of pointing at something that is stylized, but it's a little bit more realistic. So if you just play around with those four bones, you immediately get that sensation of a curvature already. And if I just kind of flip between them, you can see it, like, races the appeal a lot. And similar thing, if you wanted to make a fist, and this is kind of an extreme case, I see kind of beginning animators doing this a lot, where they just immediately, they take that flat hand and they just immediately curl those fingers in. And then you're left with these weird gaps in between. And I like, I call it forking, like it because it kind of looks like a weird fork where all these spaces are in between where they shouldn't really be. So you should really just, like, slam those fingers together, get that nice little curvature there. You can kind of flip between, see the little difference. So, yeah, the kind of point is also, just don't forget about those kind of four. And, you know, don't be surprised. That's what your hand looks like on the inside. It's just like a hunk of skin and meat and bones on the inside, a couple of tendons. All right, so first post that you do usually, if you're given a brand new rig, you start, you know, playing around with a hand. And then the first thing you want to do is just kind of relax the hand. And so, posing that, let's say this were kind of the default pose that I would be given. And then I wanted to relax it. So, I would like, you know, curl the fingers in just a bit, not too much. And tuck the thumb in a little bit, maybe move the wrist a little bit. It kind of depends on the angle, of course, because he's kind of dangling there. The, you know, you can see already there's a huge amount of difference between, like, being a bit tense and being very relaxed. A thing that I just want to mention that I see a lot of beginning animators do is that they think that there's this rotational correlation going on with the kind of last joint of the finger and the second to last, which is, you know, you can do that, but you have to have, then, a very tense finger when you do it. And it just kind of relays the information of tenseness. So, on the left, there is the same amount of rotation. The one on the right is the one I did, which is just lowering it a little bit. And so, this is what a hand looks like if you did that for all of those fingers. And it doesn't look really relaxed. So, if I just kind of flip between, you see the difference. So, it's something that I hope that people will start learning not to do it. It's also why I'm trying to make Riggers stop making those, if you want actual high-quality animation, by the way. If you want to make, they make, Riggers make these, like, long-ass bones here and then they have, just to have, like, a cheap version of it. They, you're supposed to, like, rotate them and then scale them. And if you scale them, the finger curls. But then you always have it, like, in the same ratio, whatever, and it just looks always weird and it's kind of cheap and I don't like it. I don't know. A handy pose, if you don't know what to do with a hand, because the hand can, you know, it's saying something. If you have a pose, if you have a splayed hand or if you have a fist or whatnot. Let's say you want a relaxed hand, but you feel like this is too limp. A really good pose, one of my favorites, is just this kind of relaxed curling of the fingers and resting the thumb on top of the index finger. And it feels very nice and very natural. Whether you're doing it, like, here or down here, it's very nice. So moving on a little bit from that to kind of applying pressure to the fingers. So if somebody wanted to, like, animate, I don't know, like a pose, a Spider-Man pose, something like that, they might do something like this where they put all their fingers flat on the surface. And it doesn't give the sensation at all of weight or any kind of pressure being put on it. So just by pushing those last joints, because that's really where you get the kind of idea of tenseness or weight or any kind of pressure being put on it. So you kind of flip it in between. By the way, just as a little side note, just like with any kind of posing, you're doing it towards the camera. So in this case, it's all the same pose, but just a couple of different cameras. I just want to show you, like, different angles. And out of these different angles, like, the two on the right are pretty nice. Like, they complement this pose quite nicely. The one on the bottom, whoop, am I doing it? Yeah, okay, the one on the bottom here, it's not as nice, but it's okay. This one is hideous, the one on the top left. It's really hideous. Like, if I were animating towards that shot, I would just be rotating the hand or moving a little bit to the side. Hands also, they can potentially grab a lot of attention. We use it a lot for gestures and whatnot. So this is something that is also a rule of thumb when it comes to photography or whatever, is that the subject you may want to be considering if the subject is giving the camera palm of the hand or the back of the hand. It's grabbing a lot of attention away from the face, especially if it's splayed, that's a lot of attention being grabbed from the face or from wherever you're supposed to be looking because you're the one controlling the focus of the viewer. So just as an example, look how much it's grabbing the attention of the eye and it's just competing with the face. In some cases, you might want to do it. And of course, because I'm talking about animation in general, these poses can be momentary. So you might have a thing where somebody says something and to put an emphasis on it, their hand goes outwards and kind of goes back in. So it's a momentary flash and it may work, but maybe you're talking and you keep talking like this. And it really, like the viewer has no idea where to look. The shape also of the hand, because when you're doing any kind of animation or cartoons, because of this rule of thumb of your you're abstracting a little bit and simplifying the shape and detail and complexity of what a hand is or what a character is. There is that idea of you still have the five fingers. And back in the day, they used to have like create hands that are like Mickey Mouse hands or like four fingers or whatnot. They did it for budgetary reasons, but there's another reason why you would do it still today, which is stylistic one, because the more you're abstracting the body and all these things, if you're just left with a hand that looks like a normal hand, the overall thing looks weird because then it's level of simplicity, a very, very, very complex hand. It's really weird. So how do you kind of fight that? How do you how do you take this thing that has like, it looks like a fork. If you just look at the kind of the silhouette of this thing, it looks like a weird fork. How do you simplify it? And the way it's kind of classically be done and the way I kind of became aware of it is with Disney films. So I kept calling it kind of the Disney pose where you kept like kind of grouping the fingers together and kind of kind of gluing them together. And you'll see this in a lot of Disney films. Of course, this is this like predates Disney by a lot. So if you talk to a real artist, they might call it the Renaissance fingers or some kind of I don't I've never found an official title for this, by the way. But it's a very handy thing to learn. So let's say we have some kind of a default hand and we by the way, I'm so I'm going to go over all the ways you can be gluing these fingers together. And I'm doing it in the order that I love the most and then the least. So just so you know. Okay. So the one I love the most is this guy. So the middle finger and the ring finger, they have this slight love affair. Every now and then they'll bump up against one another and they really like have this tendency of kind of gluing together. And no matter the post, even if it's like a straight on thing or a little bit curly or whatnot, it feels very nice. Then you can kind of pull in the index finger. What really is happening also there is just the fact that the pinky is a bit of a rogue. He's not on the like the knuckles. It's not really on the same level as the other knuckles. So he has this tendency in every given post to kind of be left out. But you can kind of rein him in and then you get kind of this mitten thing, which can look really weird if you just keep doing it. But if you have, if you have, you know, have it a little bit on the side, it looks nice. And it kind of feels like it's not going to compete with any other complex shapes that you have going on. This guy here where you're kind of gluing the index and middle finger, it might work a little bit better if it's a little bit curved and then you're kind of pointing at or gesturing at something. When it's flat on, you can kind of take it or leave it. This guy here especially works more as a curved thing. But I've seen it being used quite well, just in a regular post. It's okay. It's not my favorite. The least favorite out of all of them. I'm really sorry to say because I'm a Star Trek nerd. It's the Spock because he just, it just looks just visually the shape. It looks like the mass of the hand has been cloven into two parts or just, you know, if you have it in your animation just briefly, it just gives the gist of like two hunky fingers together, like two really massive fingers. So it's not very nice. So now that I've told you about this kind of gluing of the fingers technique, you'll never be able to see your favorite film again without seeing it constantly. I didn't, you know, I guess until now I didn't realize this was a kind of a secret or whatever technique, but it's yeah, it's use it, please. I want to talk a little bit about the interconnectivity also of the fingers, because it's very hard to move one finger and not influence some of the other ones. And if you have really simplified, you know, Mickey Mouse thing, you might do it and it might work fine because it's like flat shaded and you know, super simplified, but just as an experiment, can you all just try for me? Just can you just do this pose? Just really simple. Just do this pose and the next pose I'm going to do, I'm going to ask you to just replicate that also. You ready? Okay, replicate that. And you're not allowed to use your thumb to help. So I'm guessing it doesn't look like that at all. It looks more like this. It's like the other ones are kind of coming along with it. It's really weird when I see something that's supposed to be a representation of a more of a real hand that kind of on the scale and it just looks broken and looks weird. Let's let's try another one. So let's say we have kind of a fist. Okay. So we're going to replicate this. Okay. So the thing is I'm going to allow you to use your thumb, but the thing is you're not allowed to move these guys up. If you're not allowed to move those guys up, then it's going to look like that. This is very hard. It's very hard. The kind of nice, you know, the nice exceptions to this is, you know, the index finger, just because he's on the end, he has a little bit of flexibility, but in particular, the pinky. So with a little bit of help from the from the thumb. And if you're allowed to maybe slip up a little bit, you can do a lot of stuff with your with your pinky. That's very cool. So this is a very technical term. So I'm going to go from a fist to a splay. I could have used some Latin terminology, but I'm not. So I'm really just kind of right now, I'm animating this going from one post to another. I mean, I'm just kind of fixing it just a little bit here and there, just so it doesn't intersect and it feels kind of nice, but I'm really just going from this to this. And what I want to talk about is, well, you could do this. But what if you led with one finger rather than just everything at the same time? So maybe the index finger feels a bit different, right? Okay, so it and it feels natural still. It like, and if you do it yourself, it feels natural. And if you try with your pinky, that feels really natural. So if you try with your middle finger, it actually doesn't feel as natural and it feels kind of weird. Like you're really forcing it to do it. So, you know, there's like three really great ways of doing it, you know, that feel more natural, which is like everything at the same time, which, you know, given the speed, a lot of these I'm animating them kind of slow, like nobody really does it this slow. But or leading with the index or leading with the pinky. But is it the same way the other round, also a technical term? Let's say we go down. So we're making, we're taking like a splayed hand and we're going down into a fist. Um, even before I talk about that, there's two, two general ways of doing a fist. So this one, which is kind of the inverse of what I was doing before, if you did this, you kind of had to do it in two moves because if you did this, you now have to tuck it in. So it's kind of two moves. But if you curl your fingers before, now you can do it in one move. So it's not the same on the way out as the way in necessarily. So I'm going to stay with this. So let's say I now, again, lead with the index finger. It's, it's actually really weird, uh, if you, if you lead with the index finger in this case. So it's not the same coming out as coming in. Uh, but if you flip it and you go pinky finger first, it's super nice. It feels really nice. It's really the most instinctual way of doing it. And it doesn't mean that, oh, you're not allowed to do it in animation or whatever, but do it the other way. Like do whatever you want. It's fine. But, um, at some point you start wondering, like, well, why does it not feel like a real hand? Why does the gesture doesn't feel as nice as it should be? Well, maybe because you're just breaking all the rules and it just doesn't feel like a hand anymore. Um, grabbing things, if you're grabbing an object, in this case, it's like a flat cylinder. Uh, you want to have your hands not have the weird, you know, uh, forking thing going on. You want to tuck them in, uh, if you're holding something like an apple, for example, then of course it's going to follow the curvature of the hand and then they're all going to have some space in between. But in this case, uh, if you do it, this is kind of weird. If you want to have some variety, you can maybe pull the index finger just a little bit out and it should be fine. Um, also there's not one way of holding something like this. Let's say it's a staff or a piece of pipe or something like that. It, your hand is very malleable and it's always like readjusting itself. So you might be holding it like this. And if you have, for example, a staff and you're just kind of walking with the staff, uh, you might notice that you're constantly kind of shifting the angle in which you're holding the staff. Um, and it, you know, you can get away with this, by the way, I'm just kind of blending it from one to another. But if you want to really go fancy and make it readjust itself, then you might want to do something like this. And in this case, um, it's different from one post to the other. And it's probably a favorite example that I animated. It just feels very nice. Uh, so moving on to the thumb, the thumb is a bit insane because there's so much stuff going on. But, uh, in like, I had to like read a little bit about the technical aspect of it. Uh, so there's really just three basic kind of main movements of the thumb. There's the flexion and extension. There's the annoyingly named abduction and abduction. It's like think science, uh, for naming it so similar. And then there's the main one, which is the opposition. And that one is really like what makes us greatest primates or whatever. Um, it's like grabbing things and manipulating things. Um, given all of that, like with all of this, you have a lot of freedom of movement with a thumb. And it's very flexible. Uh, but up until last week, I learned that I was like, it's not as flexible for everybody. So, um, on, on the right, uh, on the left here is me and I always thought my entire life that you could make a watertight seal with your thumb or any finger in general. Um, and then on the right is my coworker, Julian, who modeled and designed the carrot. And I was like, you know, what the hell is going on with their thumb? What do you mean? It's just like a real thumb. And we're like comparing thumbs. Oh, uh, they're not the same at all. Uh, so, so there's a level of artistic freedom going on there. And just as a final little note, I want to, I want to just briefly mention the wrist and of course, shatter the illusion that, um, this kind of twist, uh, the wrist, you know, when somebody says like, you know, you're twisting the wrist or whatever, it's not really, it's all in the forearm. It's just a couple of bones that are just kind of going around until they hit each other. Uh, you shouldn't be surprised by that. You noticed, you probably noticed this your entire life. Like the wrist does nothing. It's kind of lazy. So really what it does is that it kind of goes up and it goes down almost one, 180 degrees, not quite, not fully. Um, but the thing I really wanted to point out is from kind of the sideways. So let's say you want to rotate it, you know, in the direction of the pinky and in the direction of the thumb, you can't really go a lot towards the thumb. It really just stops. So, um, what does that mean for animation? Well, it just means that what if you actually did it, it would look like this. And it really looks like a broken wrist. And I keep seeing new animators doing this. And it's really, it really annoys me and irks me. And I think I was guilty of it back in the day also, where you're holding something and then like it goes too far and it just looks broken and you can't figure out why, like what's wrong with the pose. So just to recap everything I just said, um, remember the curvature of the hand and use those four bones that are inside of the hand. Um, the, um, just be careful about when you're like trying to relax the hand, that last joint, it really plays a role into your perception of how relaxed it actually is. When in doubt, you can go for this very nice kind of relaxed thumb rest pose. If you're showing any kind of tension or you're pushing up against something with fingers, you really want to play around with that last little joint because it really gives the impression or the shape of, of, you know, pressure being pushed. They, the hands are really a tension grabby. So be careful that you don't flash the hands constantly when they're not supposed to. The, I would say there's a bit of a love affair going on between the middle finger and the ring finger and just remember that the pinky can be a little bit of a rogue. There's, there's a lot of connective tissue going on in between every finger. So just be aware of that, that it doesn't feel really broken and or unnatural when you pose it. You can decide. I mean, you know, you could just ignore this at all and just make everything happen always at the same time, but it's going to feel a bit post-aposy and then, you know, you may vary up a little bit in what order the fingers come in. If you have, if you have it weird and it's like first one, second one, third one, fourth one, it's going to feel unnatural also. So you have to, you know, try with your own hands. Grabbing things, you're constantly manipulating things as you're grabbing them and holding them and moving them. So if you just, you know, if you're just beginning to animate and you go, okay, I take up a glass and that's it. I never touch that thing again. And then I, now I do my entire scene and I'm always holding it exactly the same way. That's not how we do it. It feels very unnatural. Thumb is insanely flexible, but just test with your own thumb and don't make assumptions about your own thumb. Just maybe, like, take a kind of an average out of the people around you or, I don't know, use artistic license. And kind of at the end, the wrist, please don't break it. Please, please, please don't break it. And you could go like 45 degrees here, maybe a little bit more depending on the situation, but don't go in the other direction. Okay. That's it. Thank you so much.