<p>I needed a similar animation recently and I gave up on creating the entire animation from scratch. This is what I did instead -</p>

<p>I used a green screen and captured my hand doing the animation on video. For this purpose, it doesn't need to be a production quality green screen setup, I just used a green cloth on a table, a camera on a tripod from above and few lighting sources I had at home. The whole setup took me about half an hour.</p>

<p>The reason this doesn't need to be super quality is because you won't be actually showing this footage, just using it as the base for the masks.</p>

<p>Now, key the green background out as much as possible. If you're lucky and your green screen footage is relatively good, it will be easier and give you better lines to work with. Use various effects like blur, find edges, cartoon, extract and others to give you the lines you need. At worst case, you will be able to get only the contour of the hand, without the inner lines.</p>

<p>Use auto-trace on this to create your animated masks. These masks will be far from usable but it will give you a good base to work with. You now need to go through your composition, fixing the masks and adding the missing lines.</p>

<p>It is still a tedious work but for someone like me who has absolutely no background in animation, it gave pretty good results.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-08-15T08:36:28.533Z
2014-08-15T12:23:41.340Z
2014-08-15T12:23:41.340Z
barduck
<p>seem too be able to find every other body part except a hand animation tutorial</p>

<p>im looking to create a vector animation of a hand performing a pinch and zoom action</p>

<after-effects>
Any tutorials on how to animate a vector hand
Peco
# Any tutorials on how to animate a vector hand

(Asked by: username_0 on 2014-08-14)

seem too be able to find every other body part except a hand animation tutorial

im looking to create a vector animation of a hand performing a pinch and zoom action

**Tags:** after-effects


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2014-08-15. Score: 3

I needed a similar animation recently and I gave up on creating the entire animation from scratch. This is what I did instead -

I used a green screen and captured my hand doing the animation on video. For this purpose, it doesn't need to be a production quality green screen setup, I just used a green cloth on a table, a camera on a tripod from above and few lighting sources I had at home. The whole setup took me about half an hour.

The reason this doesn't need to be super quality is because you won't be actually showing this footage, just using it as the base for the masks.

Now, key the green background out as much as possible. If you're lucky and your green screen footage is relatively good, it will be easier and give you better lines to work with. Use various effects like blur, find edges, cartoon, extract and others to give you the lines you need. At worst case, you will be able to get only the contour of the hand, without the inner lines.

Use auto-trace on this to create your animated masks. These masks will be far from usable but it will give you a good base to work with. You now need to go through your composition, fixing the masks and adding the missing lines.

It is still a tedious work but for someone like me who has absolutely no background in animation, it gave pretty good results.


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