The Waving Hand - 3d Noodling AV Experiment

Here is another 3d noodle creation I built with a variety of tools.

This is a screen shot of the final video composition.

Here is the actual video where all the pieces came together including a custom soundtrack I composed in MPC beats. Now for some of the process.

I found a decent model of a hand on CG Trader and decided to test some materials in vray out on it. Rather than just render the hand as one material I decided to use the slice modifier on the model to cut it into different section and place different materials on each section.

I kept the original hand underneath all the slices. Then to move the slices out a bit from the original model I added a shell modifier to slightly extrude it. This way the different materials won't be intersecting and creating a mess.

Here are a couple of the vray materials I used. I just wanted to tweak some of the library material setting rather than build them from scratch. You can actually get most of the materials you need from the library with only slight modifications to fit your project.

For lighting I just used an HDRI image of a lighting studio. The image itself becomes the light source and makes it seem as if you placed the object in that room, quite handy for single object renders and even exterior environmental renders i.e. a building.

Here is a test render of the hand materials before I animated it to make sure nothing looks weird. After checking a single frame render I let it render each frame out overnight as a translucent png. This way I can compose it as an image sequence in After Effects.

Here's a screen shot of my After Effects timeline. I placed quite a few different color variations of the hand as separate layers to blend them together via masking. I also put some previous jwildfire image sequences I rendered out prior as the background to the transparent png sequences. From here I just played around with some different color and transparency effects to see the variety of what the rendering could become.

Here's a screenshot of the soundtrack I made in MPC. Pretty simple setup with drums and a couple synths looped a couple times. I might expand this song further in the future and add some real instruments to it, maybe my electric guitar and bass.

That's all for now, hope you like my strange waving hand and music lol :-)