Handrix: animating the human hand

The human hand is a complex organ capable of both gross grasp and fine motor skills. Despite many successful high-level skeletal control techniques, animating realistic hand motion remains tedious and challenging. This paper presents research motivated by the complex finger positioning required to play musical instruments, such as the guitar. We first describe a data driven algorithm to add sympathetic finger motion to arbitrarily animated hands. We then present a procedural algorithm to generate the motion of the fretting hand playing a given musical passage on a guitar. The work here is aimed as a tool for music education and analysis. The contributions of this paper are a general architecture for the skeletal control of interdependent articulations performing multiple concurrent reaching tasks, and a procedural tool for musicians and animators that captures the motion complexity of guitar fingering.