Creating 5‐fingered Playermodel rigs

Have you ever had issues with rigging fingers in your playermodels, resulting in malformed finger joints? Then PostScript's SMD Tools has an effective solution to this problem (the program was originally designed with the goal to fix this issue!). You can utilize the bone transformation dupe tool (along with Blender) to create multiple finger joint bones without ruining how your animations will look when compiled.

It is recommended that this should be done after your playermodel is in a near-complete state as the changes the tool makes to your animations won't be recognized by Blender unless you re-import them. This tutorial also assumes you know 3D model skinning and rigging

To start, open up the save of your model in Blender and select the armature. If you don't know how to properly edit GoldSRC playermodel armatures, don't worry as this tutorial will cover this as well.

Go into edit mode and select either the Bip01 R Finger1 bones or Bip01 L Finger1 bones and duplicate them, make sure they are parented properly (Finger1 to the respective hand bone, Finger11 to Finger1 and Finger 12 to Finger11) and position them to the finger joint you want. Rename those bones to follow this naming convention:

Do this as many times as you need for both hands. Once that's done, rig the model's fingers to use each new finger bone you've created, following this style:

Once everything is done, go over to the export section of Blender Source Tools. You want your model and all animations to be re-exported to have the edited armature, otherwise you'll encounter errors. To export all animations, select the animations object, this opens up a sub-menu where you can select the option "Action Filter", bringing up a text input box. In the text box, type in an asterisk, this tells BST to export all animations at once, you can then click the export button to export your animations.

After exporting your model and animations, you can then run the program. When the program opens, you want to click on the folder option next to the path input box and select the folder containing all the animations of your model:

Once you've located your animations click on the script button at the top:

This will bring up the script menu, select the "5-digit_fingers" option and click the select button:

The script will then be executed, after a couple of minutes the program will finish executing the script, completing the transformation duplicating process. You can now compile your model and have a proper 5-fingered rig for your playermodel.