Nelsons hand animation

After I had made the gun deck model and mapped it, I uploaded it to
humyo and then mr. wedgburrow worked his HDRI lighting magic on it ;)
After talking to Sam, I decided to do abit of animating as well, since
quite a few of the scenes still needed to be finished. One of the
sequences left to do was Nelsons hand covered in blood, after he had
been shot. I decided to do this because the models had already been
made, all I had to do was bone and skin the hand and create the blood.
Oh, and a portion of the deck as a background.
I started off by modifying the model of Nelson, so all that was left
was his hand and a little bit of his sleve. i did this by first
downloading the file from Humyo, converted the model to an editable
poly in max, then selected the bits i didn't need and deleted them. I
saved this as a new file, so that the complete model of Nelson wasn't
overwrited.
Once I had the bits I needed, I then boned the hand. I boned each
individual finger seperately, so I could get the most relistic movement
out of it as possible. This was particulary important as the scene was
going to be up close and personal on the hand, so detail was
everything. Once the bones were in place, i made fins come off them so
that they interact with the hand model properly, and added a skin
modifier on the hand. A quick test showed that it was working properly,
so I saved it and got to work on the blood.
At first, I thought that the blood was going to be dripping off of
Nelsons hand, but after talking with Keiron, Ben, Tim and Panos we
thought that this wouldn't be very relistic. Mainly because in this
scene, Nelson gets shot in the shoulder (ish) area, and his hand just
touches the wound so any blood thats on his hand would have been wiped
onto it, and would be more of a rsidue than anything else. I orignally
made the blood as a blob, and was intending to add a particle system to
it to make it drip, but it looked rubbish. It looked as though he had
spit his chewing gum onto his hand! Not good at all hehe
After talking to Keiron abit more, he suggested to make a map for the
blood and apply it to one side of the hand. Then, just mess around with
the uvw map settings and the gizmo to position it correctly. I thought
this was an awesome idea, and made a map based on the existing skin map
and a picture of some blood from devientART. Lightly edited in
photoshop and simmered for a few minutes, here is the results -
Original map -


New map 1 -


New map 2-
After
adding the map, I wrestled with the animation & camera &
lighting settings for a while, added a path for the camera to follow
(many thanks to Jo Bowman for the help with that) and rendered the
scene to produce this short clip for the final animation. The end may
drag out abit but that was intentional, so that the finishers had a
little extra to play with for video editing and stuff. Enjoy! -