Masking / posing is totally frustrating :(

[DarkChorus]

I am continuing to have tremendous difficulty getting any of the masking style adjustment tools to work correctly. The masks are only unadjustable, black rectangles. The adjustment tools such as Quick pose and pose either do nothing or rip the masked areas completely off of my voxel model.

My goal: Create a flat hand and then pose the fingers into a fist. I have faithfully followed the youtube video examples but either nothing happens or my models are shredded into pieces.

I apologize for the tone of this post. I have spent all winter trying to tweak a finger. Pretty sad, right?

[KlatschenKalle]

Do you want to use your sculpt in a game?

[DarkChorus]

I would like to sculpt the hand models as sign language letters. It is ok if it is a high poly / high voxel model.

I tried using curves and attaching them to the palm. Unfortunately, that required making a unique model from scratch for each sign language letter. I was hoping to make one realistic model and then pose it as necessary into each signed letter.

My latest approach is to make an open hand, port it into different software, add bones to each finger, pose the bones, and finally save the model. I am struggling with creating a skeleton with bones in the correct location and correct weight. Rigging is making the process much more complicated.

I was hoping to not need to resort to other software or some purchased model. Although, that would accomplish the task, that would not help me learn to render anything other than pre-fabricated human body parts.

Thank you for your patience with me.

Edit: I am not sure how long this service will keep my pictures online but this may help:

Image of my "best" attempts using only 3D Coat: https://ibb.co/jR2J6F

Image of my using Blender/Sculptris for a model fist: https://ibb.co/cq1BRF

[Mortal Wombat]

You should be able to get the effect you need by using the pose tool, although it can be tricky when using it with complex shapes and can it cause some warping and distortion. Not sure about the masks you are refering to?

If you use the pose tool with the transpose mode set to line and using one of the standard brush types you should be able draw a line to select a region of the object you want to adjust. You should see a red mask that transitions through yellow green and blue to shows the mask fall off. You can edit the mask fall off in the tool options.

Another approach you could try if the pose tool isn't helping is to create a segmented hand like the one in the manequin in 3d Coat. If you place the gizmo for each finger segment at the knuckle it is easy to pose the hand. Once posed you can combine the parts together and use the fill tool to close any gaps.

[KlatschenKalle]

I feel your pain. First of, getting human anatomy sculpted right is tough and a hand is not the best thing to start sculpting with. Everybody knows what a hand looks like and if you get the proportions wrong, it will look awkward.

But anyway: There is a hand reference in the "Models -> Body_Parts" Tab on the right. That should be a good start.

I would recomand to model the open hand as good as possible in 3dcoat and then follow the Retopo -> Backing workflow from your tutorials.

Import the resulting low to mid poly Model to any other 3d software you want and then follow your skeleton, weightpainting, posing approach. You'll get there. This is time consuming. My first model took me weeks, now one year later I'm down to a few hours.

I never found the posing tools from 3dcoat sufficient.

[DarkChorus]

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful, detailed replies. I will try your recommendations and tell you of any sucesses. I am unsure of the gizmos that you mention but I will look for them. I did not realize that there were Body Part models included with 3D Coat.

If the proportions in fingers become too unusual, I suppose I could re-lable my images as "Alien Claws" :-D