Hand 3d Model Maya

Modeling in Maya is a really tricky thing and it may take a lot of time trying to understand how to use all the tools in a simple way.Basically what I have tried to do is to build or model a realistic 3D hand in Maya using some simple polygons and manipulating them after adding some more subdivisions. I will try to explain my way of doing this stage by stage.

So for doing a realistic hand it is needed at least some information about it, like there are 5 fingers and 4 of them have 3 sections and the thumb have just 2 etc. Then, it would be needed a reference like a photo or a drawing of a hand that will be imported in Maya.

In the stage 1, I started with a simple cube and then I have re-dimensioned it using the photo of the hand making it as big and wide as the palm. Next I moved an edge on the x axis towards the center so I can build the thumb in that area. I added some new horizontally edges on the top and the bottom of the palm. Then I extruded the thumb from a face that was located in-between of the new edges and also I deleted the top and the bottom faces of the polygon. After that I smoothed it out and I added some more edges for future detail.

Stage 2 is where I created the fingers used a modified cube with 3 subdivisions. I added some more edges as well at the joints just for a smoother feel and then I extruded some faces to create the nails. After that I duplicate the finger 3 times to create the rest of the fingers and I have modified them so neither one would be the same and then combined them with the polygon of the palm.

Finally in the stage 3 I used only the vertices to model proper the hand. I merged the points from the top of the palm with those of the bottom of the fingers, and then played only with sculpting the entire hand after the photo. When it looked good I smoothed it and shade it with a simple lambert texture.

In conclusion, this method is the easiest one and modeling a hand could be a little bit hard but it only requires using some basic forms and some simple tools that could be learned easily and after understanding it could be just fun sculpting things.