Volume graphics has obvious benefits to medical visualization, since it represents the complete 3D information of both surface appearance and the underlying anatomical structures. This study presents an approach to rapidly creating an animatable 3D volume from in vivo human hand MRI scans. The result is a fully articulated hand volume driven by intuitive joint control that respects rigid deformation of the bone structures and produces smooth deformations of both the skin surface and the interior soft tissue regions. While the method can potentially be applied to any articulated body region, the human hand is chosen to illustrate the process, both due to its intrinsic interest in medical applications and because of the large number of degrees of freedom and challenging anatomy of the hand.