State of the Art in Hand and Finger Modeling and Animation

TLDR

The human hand is a complex biological system capable of precise, dexterous tasks, and gestures play a key role in daily communication, making the creation of believable hand motions for virtual characters a challenging yet rapidly advancing area in computer graphics. This state‑of‑the‑art report reviews research on hand and finger modeling and animation. The review examines biological hand structure, motion‑capture techniques, data‑driven and physics‑based synthesis methods, realistic surface rendering, and their application to manipulation and communication tasks. The report concludes by outlining emerging trends and applications for virtual hand animation.

Abstract

Abstract The human hand is a complex biological system able to perform numerous tasks with impressive accuracy and dexterity. Gestures furthermore play an important role in our daily interactions, and humans are particularly skilled at perceiving and interpreting detailed signals in communications. Creating believable hand motions for virtual characters is an important and challenging task. Many new methods have been proposed in the Computer Graphics community within the last years, and significant progress has been made towards creating convincing, detailed hand and finger motions. This state of the art report presents a review of the research in the area of hand and finger modeling and animation. Starting with the biological structure of the hand and its implications for how the hand moves, we discuss current methods in motion capturing hands, data‐driven and physics‐based algorithms to synthesize their motions, and techniques to make the appearance of the hand model surface more realistic. We then focus on areas in which detailed hand motions are crucial such as manipulation and communication. Our report concludes by describing emerging trends and applications for virtual hand animation.