animating hands

I have a dream of using 3dfa for some rather sophisticated hand/arm animations (interactive) to illustrate various aspects of piano technique. Any suggestions? I am a piano teacher, but not an artist - but would like to make the hands as realistic-looking as possible, with joint movements similar to the kind of thing carnwath has been posting. I've thought of trying to load bitmaps and move through sequences, but it would be hard to do smooth joint bending, etc. (I think). I would like to be able to do top-view, side-view, and perhaps an "angle view" from the top right, or top left.

i think flash maybe the wrong tool for this, you probably need to use something that has 3d capabilities like director.

cheers howard.

If you want to animate hands you can indeed use 3dfa

I would like you to PM me and can discuss this offline too.

I plan to do a hand in the next app but for the moment take a look at the limb animation in this programmed 3D interactive with two other objects (balloons) in real time on-screen.

http://www.magicities.com/hot-trix/nojunk/anabella2.swf
and
http://www.magicities.com/hot-trix/nojunk/annabella.swf

and there is a post here today about syncing action to music and tempo

Yes, I've looked at the Annabelle animation. I also saw the posts about synching to music (I haven't had time to try the new sound scripting features yet, though). Isn't Director a fairly expensive application? Of course, I guess if I want a more sophisticated 3-D hand with some realism, I may not be able to get it on the cheap - as much as I love 3DFA.

this is true, director is expensive, and i've never heard of 3dfa, i'll have a look.

cheers howard

Something along these lines????

The piano keys are controlled by a value in the array - in this example I did not synch the pianokeys with the fingers, but that part is easy. And yes - I know nothing about playing a piano as you can see.

you can use 3ds max 4, it's a professional 3d editing software, i'm not sure if you can put it on the web though...