Quite literally.

I've more or less decided, in this lead-up to the competition, that I'm going to be attempting a 3D game again. I have a somewhat lengthy design doc for it already, since I can't really act on anything yet.

But yesterday I hit into a roadblock. I can make some decent models, and animate them with little trouble… but hands. I can't model a decent looking hand for the life of me. And in the game I have planned, the player's hand needs to be visible for various reasons. And I can't have the player staring at a horribly mangled hand throughout the game, can I? Well, I could… but that's beside the point.

So I turned to drawing hands. And then I remembered that I'm going to have to animate them slightly (Due to another game feature). I nearly scrapped my idea at this point, deciding that it was going to be too much work, and I'd basically just have "Mime Simulator 2014" by the end of things if I didn't find a way to speed the creation of these buggers up.

And that's when I remembered the way Doom was made. They photographed and painted over their own hands (Holding toy weapons and such). So I sat down this morning and took a few test shots of my hand, and started plugging them into Exile's engine.

First result with minimal processing (Aside from the cutout and some basic color reduction):

Then I started playing around with scale, colors, alpha, etc.

And then I decided that no, I'd need to a bit more work. So I spent the afternoon playing around with various techniques, and finally settled upon a system of Posterization, painting a detail map in grayscale based on the original image, Multiplying the color and detail map together, and doing a bit more work.

Results are:

So I've decided that, with a bit of care taken with the details and such, this method will be the perfect way to get some hands into the game.

Roll on Tuesday… I'm going stir crazy here :P