Hands

Hand position is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of animation.  As you can see in the Stance Tutorial, having unnatural hand positions can cause the entirety of a pose to look stiff and unnatural.  Despite this fact, animators very often leave the hands in default positions, or simply move them around as rigid masses, paying no attention to the movements of the fingers.

You'll understand why this is the case when you think about how much detail is held in the movement of the hands.  The fingers alone comprise three bones each, times five fingers, for a total of fifteen bones per hand.  By comparison, the entire rest of the body can comprise as few as sixteen bones (depending on how it is boned).

When you consider that each hand covers something like one twentieth of the screen area covered by the rest of the body, the tendency to overlook these small and complicated structures can be more readily explained.  Still, overlooking the position of the hands is a serious mistake.

The best of both worlds would be to make manipulating the fingers easy enough that it could be done quickly, and with a minimum of bother.  This tutorial will show you how to do just that.
 
Dabble Tutorial  (Zipped file of Dabble Tutorial)

    Page 1: Abstracting finger motion
    Page 2: Control Container
    Page 3: Constraining the Thumb
    Page 4: Inverse Kinematics
    Page 5: Abstracting hand motion
    Page 6: Wave control structure
    Page 7: Constraining finger targets
    Page 8: Binding fingers to targets
    Page 9: Setting the preferred bend direction
    Page 10: Animating the controls