Hands Motion Capture & Retargeting — Bringing Hands Motion to Your Custom Characters

Hands Motion Capture & Retargeting — Bringing Hands Motion to Your Custom Characters

Category
Announcements
Date
November 28, 2025

In the previous post, we introduced Hands Motion Capture (Beta) — a new feature that enables real-time capture of not only full-body movement but also detailed hand motions. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at how to achieve more natural and accurate wrist and finger animation by applying this hand data to your custom characters inside MOVIN Studio.

Hands Motion Capture (Beta) is supported on Firmware Version 2.0.0 and above. If you haven’t tried this feature yet, please follow the Firmware Update Guide to upgrade to the latest version. You can check your current firmware by entering 192.168.2.100:8001 into your browser and navigating to System Monitor → Firmware Version.

If the hand motion results look unnatural or unstable when testing with the MOVINMan character, we recommend reviewing the Hands Motion Capture (Beta) Guide to ensure that your capture environment is properly set up.

Once your Hands Motion Capture environment is ready, let’s explore the hand retargeting features that help you bring natural, expressive hand motion to your custom characters.

Hands Motion Capture & Retargeting — Bringing Hands Motion to Your Characters

To transfer hand motion onto a custom character, the captured data must be accurately retargeted to the character’s hand bone structure. Below are the key retargeting features used for this process.

Pose Matching

As with full-body retargeting, aligning the Rest Pose is essential.

Retargeting may look unnatural if:

  • The character’s wrist or finger Rest Pose differs significantly from MOVINMan
  • Finger joints are bent or oriented unnaturally in the Rest Pose

For the best results, adjust the character’s Rest Pose to match MOVINMan before applying retargeting.

image

Bone Mapping

In the Bone Mapping step, you can connect the wrist and each finger chain to the character’s skeleton. Correctly setting each finger chain ensures that the rotation data from Hands Motion Capture is applied to the right bones, resulting in natural finger movement.

Use the infographic to select the finger you want to set up, since each finger is displayed separately. After selecting a finger, add its bones in order to build the chain. Then assign a Bone Flag to mark the first bone of the chain (for example, the thumb’s first bone should be set as ThumbStart).

After all fingers have their starting points assigned, click Auto Setting. This automatically creates the Rotational Mapping based on bone length, bone structure, and the Bone Flags, giving you more accurate and stable finger motion.

Build the Chain — Add the bones in order for each of the five finger chains shown in the infographic to set up the Finger Chain.
Build the Chain — Add the bones in order for each of the five finger chains shown in the infographic to set up the Finger Chain.
Rotational Mapping — Auto Setting automatically configures the Finger Chain’s Rotational Mapping
Rotational Mapping — Auto Setting automatically configures the Finger Chain’s Rotational Mapping

Retargeting

To compensate for structural differences between MOVINMan and your custom character, several options help refine the final animation.

Thumb FK Scale

Thumb FK Scale
Thumb FK Scale

This option controls how much FK rotation is applied to the thumb. Because thumb proportions vary widely across characters, applying source motion directly can result in:

  • Excessive bending
  • Insufficient folding

Adjusting Thumb FK Scale amplifies or reduces rotation to create a natural thumb movement.

Correct Finger Twist

Correct Finger Twist
Correct Finger Twist

This feature solves issues where:

  • Fingers twist unnaturally to the side
  • Joint rotation axes appear misaligned

When enabled, the system redistributes rotation along the twist axis, maintaining a natural bending shape.

Correct Finger Twist(Fist)

Correct Finger Twist (Fist)
Correct Finger Twist (Fist)

Designed specifically for fist poses, it prevents:

  • Fingers collapsing into each other
  • Excessive cross-over
  • Distorted fist shapes

With this option on, finger folding becomes more stable across different character proportions.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we explored the retargeting options that help you apply hand motion data from Hands Motion Capture (Beta) to your custom characters in a natural and accurate way. From wrist rotation to subtle finger articulation, properly mapping and fine-tuning each part of the hand is essential for achieving high-quality hand animation—especially since every character has its own bone structure and proportions. Rest Pose alignment, Finger Chain setup, Rotational Mapping, and thumb/finger correction options can all influence the final result depending on your character’s style, so be sure to review them carefully.

When used effectively, these retargeting tools allow you to bring the same natural hand motion you see on MOVINMan directly onto your own characters. By minimizing distortion caused by proportion differences and preventing unwanted twisting, you can achieve more stable, expressive, and visually accurate hand performance.

Hands Motion Capture (Beta) and the related retargeting features will continue to evolve, with improvements aimed at supporting a wider variety of character styles and workflows.

For detailed option descriptions and step-by-step guides, please visit MOVIN Docs.

If you have any questions while using MOVIN Studio, feel free to reach out anytime on our MOVIN Discord channel.