Hand Sculpts

Each neutral hand pose from our Hand Scan library was carefully cleaned, retopologized and precision sculpted to create high quality intermixable Hand Sculpts. They share the same mesh topology and UVs, allowing for the blending of both geometry and textures, fully or in various proportions, to create new hand shapes and modifications.

Hand Sculpts Collection

Hand Sculpt products go along side our Hand Scan Library, and features the same 230 individual hand models. Out of which 119 women and 111 men of varied ages, ethnic origins and professions. Each hand sculpt product page has its original scan product page linked at the bottom of the page where you can browse that model set of 62 unique hand poses.

Scan Cleaning and Sculpting

Hand sculpts were handcrafted to the highest level of quality from our own hand 3D scans. Creating sculpts based on scans is tricky, no matter how good the scan is, it is very easy to ruin it on the cleaning stage with unnecessary smoothing and lack of anatomy and form understanding. Each scan requires its own slightly different approach, but the baseline is that we try to preserve the medium to small scanned details as much as possible without losing the overall shape and volume. Hands also present additional complexity with the fingernails. Having smooth surface, lacking much detail and being shiny, nails usually do not reconstruct well. As a result, careful reconstruction of the nail shape and borders is required to ensure they are a perfect match.

Base Mesh Topology

We wanted you to be able to morph between any two hands, mix features, and make it possible to create new hand shapes based on this large sample of various hands. This requires the underlying mesh topology to be the same. Below, you can see the base mesh that was used for all 230 hand sculpts. Our topology is sectioned using colored polygroups to outline joints and other unique hand elements. Each polygroup section was carefully placed to ensure correct correspondence between elements of any two Hand Sculpts.

UV Layout and Textures

All hand sculpts also share the same UV layout. This enables you to mix texture details from various hands. And because topology was carefully matched to make sure hand features are matching, you will also see that reflected on the textures.

Textures for all hand sculpts were created by projecting full set of photographs on a cleaned toplogy. All input photographs were calibrated and processed in Linear Color Space. This is done so that the textures and materials react correctly under different lighting conditions in a CGI environment. This ensures that the material properties, such as reflectivity and transparency, behave in a physically accurate manner. If you want to know more about it, please read our Linear Color Space blog post.

As a texture quality preview here you can see 100% close up of a section showed in green on a previous image.

Technical Information

Each Hand Sculpt is delivered as a Zbrush *.ztl format Subtool with 7 subdivision levels and 8192x8192 pixels uncompressed *.tif texture in Linear Color. Below you can see polycount breakdown for each subdivision level:

Morphing and Mixing

With the hand scan library and Hand Sculpt product, we aim to simplify the challenging and complex process of creating believable CGI hand models. Since all Hand Sculpts share the same topology and UVs, you can mix or replace features between hands, create new hand variations, and blend textures. Additionally, because models in our library range in age from 18 to 76, you can simulate the aging process. Also, for each Hand Sculpt there’s 61 additional hand pose available as scans, which you can easily wrap the sculpts to.

Also, for each hand sculpt, there are over 60 additional hand poses available as scans, which you can easily wrap the sculpts to and create morph targets or blend shapes for animation.