Fractured

Hello

Welcome back. I wanted to make something, well, newish. I've been listening to hip hop beats all of my life now and people these days now call it lofi. I think it's because of how chill a beat can make you feel in the moment. So I wanted to take my feeling of this hip hop instrumental beat, and make it into a visual representation of that feeling, or I guess my metal state.

Inspiration

I honestly don't know what made me think of a hand with a floating orb on top of it. Maybe that's just a representation of my artistic brain with my skull shattering around it (lol). I guess I just wanted to go with something that was ethereal and mysterious. The coolest thing about instrumental music, is that it can make you feel joy, sorrow, or rage. Whereas with normal music with lyrics, it's predetermined on a theme. That's just my point of view anyway.

Process

I started with a very low polygon hand with a sphere on top. I already had the image in my head of what this was going to look like but I wasn't satisfied on how the hand looked. Then I remember that I had previously worked on hands from a past project that looked ten times better than this one.

After that, I used a built in addon called cell fracture. You can basically break apart any object you want. From 5 pieces to a gazillion pieces. You can also animate the broken objects but from there it gets kind of complicated. Such as if you wanted a ball crashing into a square and making it explode using physics. I won't go into details on that, but if you were to choose that route, it would yield you some interesting results.

For the animation side of things. I would make a looping animation of the fractured objects and the hand. Of course there's more that went into it. Such as parenting the sphere object to the hand bone so I'm not animating a whole bunch of objects all at once. It's just another way of lightening my work load.

As for texturing and using materials. The node system was the way to go. Not too much went into this part. I basically was trying to make things the way I wanted it to look. I wanted to make the floor look like a hard surface. The texture for the shattered rocks have zero roughness to it, making it look very shiny. I did the same thing for the sphere, except, I put a light source behind it. As for the whole entire scene in general. I wanted an empty feeling, like being stuck in purgatory, yet hopeful.

After that, I rendered it in png's this time so it wouldn't lose its quality. The process of that took about 5 hours to finish with 1000 frames of animation. Then I moved it into adobe premiere pro to time it with the music I used, and then moved it into after effects to touch up on some more things. Here are the results of that.