Fingers have great flexibility, many knuckles very close to each other and so many degrees of freedom. Recording full fingers' action is uneasy and so many still prefer animating fingers by hand either by keyframing or by using pose libraries. This works, however compared to full body animation recorded by the motion capture, fingers often lack the subtle moves we all do.

So, if fingers' action is to be rather recorded, we offer two ways.

Optical motion capture

We attach very small markers on each knuckle of a performer and then record the moves using optical motion capture system. This results in quite precise optical data, that must be custom retargeted onto actual CGI skeleton.

• Note that Autodesk Motion Builder does support retargetting in very basic form with markers on finger tips, which is not very good as the tips are the first place that gets occluded when one forms a fist or touches something.
• We developed our own pipeline to transfer the fingers' moves on an skeleton bypassing the Actor tool in Motion Builder at all. However, the transfer would have to be done by us, the client would provide their CG character and we'd transfer the data on an actual skeleon.
• Fingers can be moved to many different poses and some marker occlusions may hapeen in the performer doesn't adjust his acting to this situation. Our engineer always overlooks the action and proposes possible changes to ensure as few markers are hidden to the motion capture system as possible.

Data gloves

We also use a pair of 16-sensor wireless data gloves by Data Glove 16 by 5DT. Teoretically, data gloves should be the optimal way to record fingers' moves, however most of them, including Data Glove, are not precise enough for production purposes. The resulting data is not sufficient for production (in short, it is not precise enough for direct output), and rather it is used as reference data for the animator at best.

The data from the data gloves is directly transmitted to Motion Builder and recorded there. Then, the data can be retargeted to the rig of the character’s hands.