Hammer Time: Case Study

            To best capture the tone of anticipation into surprise in this project, I had to set everything up as if it was going to be a normal motion graphics video. Bright textures, fluid motion, simple background…then, the ending, which subverts all expectations. While I do not think I did a particularly stellar job in the texturing, there are plenty of new techniques I learned from this project that are worth talking about, which thereby solidifies my confidence that this project is worth sharing. Of course there is room for improvement, but that will come with time.

            First of all, the setup looks like this:

            Here we can see a camera (left) pointed towards the scene. Both the hammer and the nailed-in box are modeled by me. Behind them is a green background (which showed up black in the renderer due to intentional exclusion of any light sources) that will later be used for tweaking in After Effects. On the hammer and box are a myriad of light sources; three on the box, two on the hammer, all with altered intensities to give off a brightly lit feel to them. Each object is reflecting an HDRI of a suburban town, which was already provided through Cinema 4D, to give the most realistic possible look. Finally, I have made sure to add a slight bump map onto the wooden block, a subtle “Hard Light” noise map onto the grey of the texture, and fake speculars to the handle, since that never seemed to reflect well with the sky.

            The topology of each object can be seen here:

            The stars of the show on this project, though, came from the use of soft and rigid bodies. The main reason why this project works comes from a tricky use of connectors that allows the hammer to be both a rigid and a soft body at the same time.

            The hierarchy is set up like so:

           

            In a nutshell, the head of the hammer is a soft body, and the handle is the rigid body. The problem that I kept running into was getting the soft body to stick onto the rigid body without simply sliding off. I tried parenting one to another: no good. Then, I tired making the underside of the hammerhead a rigid body while the rest of the polygons were soft…again, no good. Eventually I realized that in order for the hammer to properly swing, I needed to use a connector between the hammerhead and the handle, and then set it to “fixed” so that it cannot move. The “Swing” connector (which was set to “Hinge”) would then be applied to the rigid body hammer at the bottom, and tied to a cylinder that would allow it to swing, with a fixed rotational angle. After increasing the object’s stiffness significantly, the hammer swings with the illusion that the head is rigid, until the very end, where it collides with the nail.

            Afterwards, I put the project into After Effects, keyed out the green screen, and changed into a nice blue gradient. I figured this would look a lot better if done in a 2D program than relying off of fake 3D light to ensure the background looked good.

            This was a quick process. All I had to do was add the gradient background, add a blueish hue/saturation of 17% opacity, and tweak the levels a bit to get it to look like what it does now.

             In conclusion, I think I learned a lot from this very short, fun project, and I cannot wait to continue expanding my knowledge onto more ideas, and ultimately get closer to creating the 3D motion graphics reel that I am working towards. This project is not perfect, but I am satisfied with the outcome, and will absolutely come back to it later for updates.