Quick Hands in Blender, OR What Clear Transform Location means

Today, I'm going to show you my quick cheaty way to do hands when hands aren't the focal point of the pose. I'm also going to show you how you can rotate a pose so that the joint is dislocated, and how to put that joint back in place without losing the rotation- aka: Clear Transform-Location.

We're going to start off with Harriet as our rig of choice, and to begin we will make her left hand into a quick fist.

For starters, select ALL the base knuckle joints on the Left hand. Then hit R, and type in 70 on the keypad and then hit enter.

See how the back of the hand gets all lumpy? We're going to fix that by hitting Alt+G. I'll get into WHY we do that in a moment.

Next, you will select all the middle knuckles on the hand and hit R on the keyboard, and then type in 90 on the keypad and then enter.

From the side (view 3 on the keypad) you can see the fingers are rotating slightly to the front of our Rig (The pointer finger shows it best.) So I want to rotate those fingers straight. This is always just a guessed number. Just do it until you feel they are straight.

Here's a very over rotated edition of that rotation. Notice the pinky is much longer, the pointer much shorter. That's because in this over rotation you've 'dislocated' the joint. You've stretched the bone. And that's something we don't want because it looks awful and painful in game. Hitting Alt+G keeps the rotation, but it puts the joints back into position.

After hitting Alt+G you'll see how nice your fingers look. There is no sideways bending and everything is properly rotated.

To finish the Quick Fist, select all the final knuckles and rotate them by 90*. Now you just need to adjust the thumb to your liking, and make minor tweaks to the hand, wrist, and individual fingers to make sure your fist looks like a fist.

Now, We'll do a Quick Relaxed Hand

We'll do this on the rig's right hand. Again, begin by selecting all the base knuckles.

Then you'll hit R on your keyboard, and then type in -15 on the keypad and then hit enter. (We're doing a negative value on the right hand. We would use a positive value on the left hand.)

This time we're going to go to the Pose Menu at the bottom of our screen.

You'll see the words Clear Transform as a submenu, go ahead and select this menu.

Now we see the word Location (With Alt G next to it. That's your hotkeys to do it without the menu.) Go ahead and select it to get the joints back in proper position.

You'll see the first knuckles look less lined up, and more spread out. That's perfect.

Now select all the middle knuckles.

For the Middle Knuckles you'll hit R on your keyboard, and then type in -10 on the keypad and then hit enter. Then, either using the menu, or by hitting Alt+G clear the location of the joints.

Finally, select the end most knuckles and repeat the same steps as you did for the middle knuckles (R, -10, Enter, Alt+G or menu Clear Transform-Location.)

Now, you still need to tweak individual fingers, and you'll still need to pose the thumb, but this will quickly get you to a point where it's a lot easier to finish your hands. Make sure you do this very early on in posing, or else using the straight on angles (x, y or z hit twice so the axes will align with the joint in it's current position,) or you'll get some really wonky results. This is just a way to get your hands in a roughly acceptable manner quickly without fiddling around and posing each individual joint on the hands. These hands are NOT beautiful. They are quick.

Also- in the Clear Transform submenu you will have noticed the word All. This option will completely reset the selected joint(s) back to the original position. Very handy when you think you've boogered up only a few joints, but the rest looks fine.