Hand Geometry Experiment

I don’t claim to be a professional 3D artist. My skills fall somewhere between enthusiast and amateur, whereas I can navigate my way around Blender and Cinema 4D, but when imagining concepts to explore, my thoughts usually stay confined within hard surface models. Geometric shapes that have clean, straight lines. Objects that you can piece together the primary shapes used to build it. A square here, a cylinder there. So when I was browsing Pinterest for inspiration, I found an image set of hands interacting with each other while the artist had webbed text between each finger. The photograph enhanced by this graphic treatment was interesting to me and presented a challenge to my current skill in 3D.

“… you could probably prompt this into existence.”

I asked myself what would it take to recreate this and maybe add some motion to it. Yeah okay, you could probably prompt this into existence, but changing the letters would be painful. Also there wasn’t any deadline, so no pressure to get lost in some organic hand geometry. With no sculpting experience besides my middle school ceramics class, I quickly found Daz 3D through a Cinema 4D artist’s tutorial on YouTube. Daz 3D lets you model characters and then bring them in as geometry into Blender. This is how I achieved the hand shape. I then went on to build each strand of text using the Wikipedia article for hands as placeholder text. The next step was to find a free skin material online that would feel realistic enough. I think I googled it and found a free version of detailed skin texture that interacts with light correctly. I took the render into photoshop to add some post processing and was delighted by the end result, enough at least to share it online with everyone.

What I tried

• Organic Geometry and Materials
• Inspiration to concept
• Post Processing
• Daz 3D posing

Straight out of Blender Post-processed