Boning and skinning the hand

In order to make the fingers of the hand move, I first needed to create bones for it. So, I ensured that there were 3 bones in each finger. This was done using the bone creation tool. Next, I Selected each bone in the finger and assigned it to the relevant helper that I created at the end of every finger. Assigning them enabled the finger to move simply by using the helper, rather than selecting each individual bone.

The next task was to sort out each vertex so that the fingers did not pull on other fingers. To do this, I selected the mesh and in the modifier panel selected envelope under the skin sub-title. From here, I was then able to select the surrounding vertices of each bone that should not have been selected, by ensuring that they had no colour, where as the selected ones needed to be red. (Shown below). This section was especially time consuming because it was very tricky trying to get the fingers to move without affecting any of the other surrounding vertices.

Now that the fingers move exactly as I want them to, the final task was to simply use the key frames to create a short move to see how they look when they are all animated together. The final outcome looks pretty effective.