Previously, Ludwig had relied on Maya's nCloth for his creature work but admits to having difficulty getting the results he wanted. According to Ludwig...
"nCloth was always such a slow process and had such long simulation times. This was an important project for me because this was my chance to showcase my abilities and passion to create cool and realistic creatures before graduation. I needed it to work quickly and still look good. That would be difficult to accomplish with nCloth, but at the time, I didn't know what else to use."
While fighting through his initial muscle simulation with nCloth, Ludwig was introduced to Ziva VFX through a talented Rigging TD at Important Looking Pirates. His friend urged him to make the switch to Ziva after having stumbled upon Ziva himself back in May, 2019.
Over the next few weeks, Ludwig spent all of his free time building the gliding leaf frog scene and simulation. According to Ludwig, "I wanted to show off the flexible and lean muscles on the tiny creature, so I made sure the muscle excitation was quite low. There is minimal jiggle appendages and only a little around the abdomen. The scale is probably one of the most unique features about my character and I knew it needed to be different from the other simulations on the Ziva website."
Ludwig believes that the main advantage of using Ziva was the rapid simulation speed. He was able to simulate a lot of muscles in a short amount of time and this allowed him to make multiple iterations and learn along the way, "Ziva was very useful, especially since I am new to the game. I was unsure of how things will turn out beforehand, but it all happened so quickly that I didn't even have to worry about my timelines."
