Studio@jumpers-inn.de

Sometimes, it’s just cool to have access to expensive toys! Okay, let’s start at the beginning. My colleague Rainer is working in the field of programming by demonstration and therefore uses data gloves to monitor human hand movement. Unfortunately these gloves need a very good calibration to give good results and the mapping of the glove data to a model is useless if the hand model is not accurate. The problem now was to get an accurate model of a human hand, ideally from Rainer’s hand. Since we do have a 40,000 € 3D digitizer in our lab we obviously thought about scanning his hand. It turned out to be tricky because you need several scans from different viewpoints and a human can’t hold his fingers in the exact same position for that so results are not that great. Usually, if you want to scan a hand, you make a clay model of the hand and scan that. And that is pretty much what we did. We got ourselves some Creaform and Artestone and went to work. Surprisingly, the first try succeeded so well that we got this:

The finished hand model with a stand.

Now all left to do was take this and put it into the modeling center to process. Several minutes later (thanks to Rapidform!) the finished 3D model turned out to be really great. Below is a render of the high resolution scan version (right side, ~200,000 faces) and a automatically reduced version (left side, ~5000 faces).

Left: auto reduced version (5k tris) Right: scan version (200k tris)

Every once in a while things just go smooth and easy!

UPDATE: Spent some more time with the render settings

Spent some more time with the render and material settings