Subtle animation details such as finger or facial movements help to
bring virtual characters to life and increase their appeal. However, it
is not always possible to capture finger animations simultaneously
with full-body motion, due to limitations of the setup or tight production
schedules. Therefore, hand motions are often either omitted,
manually created by animators, or captured during a separate
session and spliced with full body animation. In this paper, we
investigate the perceived fidelity of hand animations where all the
degrees of freedom of the hands are computed from reduced marker
sets. In a set of perceptual experiments, we found that finger motions
reconstructed with inverse kinematics from a reduced marker
set of eight markers per hand are perceived to be very similar to
the corresponding motions reconstructed using a full set of twenty
markers. We demonstrate how using this reduced set of eight large
markers enabled us to capture the finger and full-body motions of
two actors performing a range of relatively unconstrained actions
using a 13-camera motion capture system. This serves to simplify
the capture process and to significantly reduce the time for cleanup,
while preserving the natural biological movements of the hands
relative to the actions performed.