Cloth Sim Reel

Cloth Pipeline Tool from Nikhil M Anand on Vimeo.

More Cloth on its way!

Hi!

Ok so now its time I get some updates of myself out here on my blog.. I've been in Bangkok for some time now. Its been a great working holiday so far! NCloth is beginning to treat me pretty well off late with a whole bunch of tests in the pipeline. Wrinkles on CG Cloth have been the holy grail for most cloth artists in our industry. But trust me guys this is one beast you must do your best to tame. And I say again you must 'cause once tamed, he becomes your best friend!!

So well my loyal blog followers.... Keep your eyes peeled on this page! Cause you are not gonna be disappointed!

Cheers!

Nikhil.

Warrior Princess - Cloth test

The 1st phase on Willa's cloth test results is online now! I modeled her skirt and setup the simulation and tests over the weekend. It took about a day from start to the current phase of the sim testing. It still needs work in a few areas though. The second part of the shot is what's gonna be most challenging. Love challenges!!
The animation was by Sam Baker. Thanks Sam!
Do keep tabs on my blog for further exciting updates! Still more to come!!

3D World tips for impressive fluid effects

Five of the industry’s leading fluid experts provide a selection of tips designed to help avoid that sinking feeling when simulating (and faking) fluid-filled scenes.
I found this article very informative.

Celtic Ghoul - Rigging & Cloth

I've had the pleasure to work on this awesome character code named "Celtic Ghoul". He was conceptualized & modeled by Cory Collins & animated by Sam Baker. My role involved the rigging & cloth simulation. There is still a lot of work to get done on this animation short involving the ghoul & Willa. For now I have this short clip to showcase the current work in progress. I hope you like it!

3D World Cloth Simulation tips

Here are some very good cloth simulation tips which would be really useful for cloth artists.

Spanish Flamenco Rendered with displacements

Here's a render of Willa wearing a Spanish Flamenco outfit. If anybody out there would like to animate this character with a good mexican or latin american dance, do let me know! I'd be happy to give you this rig so that we can have her look amazing!

Willa Cloth

Here's Willa doing her dance. Hope you like it :)

Update!

Ok, so its been 2 weeks now since my last post. Here's the update. The high-end creature rigging for AFX has been going pretty smooth. Done using a combo of muscle simulations and psd techniques, its been quite an amazing project. The test renders are looking awesome with the creatures doing some crazy stuff in the film - the AFX team rocks! These mean beasts in this flick are sure gonna be something to reckon with.

Coming back to Willa, I recently laid my hands on some motion capture animation which looked pretty decent. Past couple of days was spent on cleaning up that data since it was recorded from a character who was smaller in frame than Willa who is slightly broad shouldered being a warrior princess. Though the funny thing here is that Willa is now doing the rock and roll! Wonder if people belonging to her time and age even knew what rock and roll was all about! Now she is all ready for the next stage which is Cloth Simulaton. Once the cloth setup is done, I would be putting all these elements together and we should see a fully rendered animation of the warrior princess up online for you guys!

On the TD front, I've been putting together an auto-rigging pipeline tool which has been in progress for some time now. I've always used a combination of scripts when I do character rigging in Maya since its rarely the case where 2 characters or creatures need to do the same thing in any major production. So I've developed a set of custom scripts for different such scenarios with a permutation & combination of anatomical body parts that make up any creature.

Hair Test Render

Its personal projects time!

Its been a week since I updated my blog. I'm trying to be regular now :) The next project in the pipeline is a hairstyle for Willa and a ghoul creature in action. This ghoul was modeled by none other than Cory Collins. I recently finished rigging the ghoul and I'm hoping Cory gets the time in his busy schedule to animate :) There some good secondary dynamics and cloth to be done with Mr.Ghoulie too. I'm lovin it! Exciting work happening finally on the personal reel front!! Woot!! Woot!!

Willa Animation Test

Here's an animation test done by the one and only Cory Collins :). Mark my good friend created Willa and gave me the opportunity to rig her up. Willa's a game model and we hope to have her do some fun stuff soon!