Yep.  Working on a new hand model that I’ll use as a base for all my other mech hands.  

The difficulty in modeling hands for mechs is that they are not flexible like real hands.  There is no flesh to have give and take, so you have to build gaps in for the mechanics of it to move around.  

Yes, mechs use myomer muscles and all that, but (as we can all see from the drawings) there are still mechanical actuators involved so that has to be part of the design as well so we have gaps.  Those gaps need to be protected too so we have overlapping plates that would be part of an armored hand, but it still needs the actuators to have a skeletal structure to work from and depending on the mech there might not be that much armor to start with.  Could be thin stuff that has lots of exposed pieces so I have to think about that too on my basic design.

The last thing I will need to do is see if everything bends and moves for posing the way it should.  I fudged it for quite a while on my old models, but now it’s time to step that part up as well.   

So I’m getting a good, basic foundation set up that I can then build from to make other designs.