CHARACTER FX · CLOTH BREAKDOWN

Teddy Bear Kurta

A Maharashtrian-style kurta designed, built, simulated and look-developed for a provided teddy bear character: believable weight, folds and fit, no interpenetration, and surfacing matched to a real Paithani fabric reference.

ROLE: Everything: garment design, modeling, UVs, cloth simulation, lookdev, lighting, rendering, farm submission, edit
SOFTWARE: Maya (garment model, UVs) · Houdini 22 (Vellum, Solaris, Karma XPU, MaterialX, VEX) · husk render farm · ffmpeg
PLATFORM: Rocky Linux · Houdini FX Education Edition
TIMELINE: About 3 weeks, with in-class reviews at the start of each session

VFX 440 Character Effects: Cloth Pipeline · SCAD, Fall 2026 · Prof. Timothy Steele

Design and reference

PAITHANI · MAHARASHTRA

The brief: a realistic, fully simulated garment made specifically for the bear, with believable weight, folds, fit and contact, no interpenetration, and surfacing that matches a real-world fabric reference. All garment assets were created by me.

The garment is inspired by a men's kurta with Paithani detailing, the silk weaving tradition of Maharashtra: a deep red body with small gold butti motifs, a gold zari border with parrot (muniya) motifs on the hem and cuffs, a band collar, a front placket, and side slits.

Final render: teddy bear in a red Paithani-style kurta on a dark platform — Final close-up. Reference photos were used for design only and are not reproduced here.

Iterations

V1 → FINAL

The simulation went through several versions, each one responding to a review.

Six-step iteration timeline from the first stiff kurta to the final lookdev — Iteration timeline

VERSION	WHAT HAPPENED	WHAT I CHANGED
v1	First kurta, built from the bear's own torso mesh. Stiff, with the sleeves passing through the arms.	Rebuilt the garment instead of patching it.
v2	The kurta stretched to the floor under its own weight.	Bend stiffness had been set as high as stretch stiffness (1e10), so the solver spent its iterations on bending. Fixed bend, and added enough constraint iterations for the mesh resolution.
v3	A clean rebuild: collar attached to the bear, push-out against a VDB of the bear so nothing started inside the body. Clean collisions.	Faculty feedback: still too stiff.
v4	Re-modeled the whole garment in Maya for clean topology and UVs. Much softer folds, but sleeve collision failures.	Traced them to the bear's arm intersecting its own torso, which leaves the cloth nowhere to go.
v5	Sleeves clean after fixing the arm–torso intersection.	Locked the sim.
Final	Look development on a studio set, presented with a fixed camera and a rotating character.	–

Before: first stiff pass with the sleeves through the arms, shown in wireframe — Stiff drape, sleeves through the arms

After: final render, Maya garment with Vellum sim and Paithani lookdev — Maya garment, Vellum sim, Paithani lookdev

Garment construction

MAYA · UVS

Modeled in Maya as a single-layer garment with even quads (about 4 mm at the bear's 0.42 m scale), leaving clearance from the body.
UVs cut where a tailor would sew (side seams and under the arms), with uniform texel density so the fabric pattern stays the same size on the body, skirt and sleeves.
Construction details: side slits, hem, cuffs and a front placket, each trimmed with a Paithani border. Trims are selected from the open edges of the mesh and filtered by their T-pose (rest) position, so they never flicker.
The collar band and the skin-tight pants are deformed with the character rather than simulated, the way stiff interlined pieces and tight garments are usually handled in production.

UV seam selection on the kurta in Houdini — UV seams

UV layout with a checker texture on the kurta — UV layout with checker

Simulation

VELLUM · HOUDINI 22

PROBLEMS SOLVED ALONG THE WAY

Stretching

Bend stiffness accidentally matched stretch stiffness, starving the stretch constraints of iterations.

Cloth starting inside the body

A push-out wrangle samples a signed-distance VDB of the bear and moves every point to a set clearance.

Hands sticking to the cloth

Caused by an oversized friction attribute on the collider.

Sleeve pinching

The arm intersected the torso, which no solver setting can resolve. The fix had to happen on the character.

Houdini Vellum Constraints parameters for the kurta — Vellum settings

Maya-modeled kurta with collision failures marked on the sleeves — Iteration 4: sleeve collision failures

Four-view playblast of the Maya kurta with clean sleeves — Iteration 5: sleeves fixed

Look development

KARMA XPU · MATERIALX

Body fabric: deep red silk with a woven bump, tinted sheen, and gold butti that are metallic, slightly raised, and glossier than the silk.
Paithani border: gold zari with parrot motifs on the hem, cuffs, slit trim and placket.
Feedback applied: a classmate suggested more specularity and height on the gold and a bump on the red. Both are in the final.

Close-up render of the Paithani border on the hem and cuffs — Border material

MaterialX node network inside a Karma Material Builder — MaterialX nodes

TEXTURE SET

$Texture: kurta body color$
BODY COLOR
$Texture: kurta body gold mask$
GOLD MASK
$Texture: kurta body height$
HEIGHT
$Texture: Paithani border color$
PAITHANI BORDER
$Texture: Paithani brocade color$
PAITHANI BROCADE

AI-assisted textures. The pattern tiles were generated with AI assistance (Gemini). I then made them seamlessly tileable, scaled them, and turned them into the gold masks and height maps shown here.

Presentation and lighting

TURNTABLE · KARMA

Following faculty direction, the final uses a standard look-development setup: one fixed camera and fixed lights, with the character rotating, so every side of the garment is lit and judged the same way.

Backdrop: a fabric sweep, itself simulated with Vellum (pinned along the top, settled, then frozen).
Platform: a dark pedestal that grounds the character.
Layout: a four-view review followed by a turntable, based on the class example.

Vellum-simulated fabric backdrop sweep — Backdrop cloth sim

Karma viewport render of the bear on the platform with soft shadows — Lookdev viewport

▶ WATCH THE FULL REVIEW (0:11)

Four-view lookdev review: front three-quarter, side, back three-quarter and front of the bear on the platform — Final four-view review

Turntable frame showing the kurta from the side — Turntable, side

Turntable frame showing the back of the kurta — Turntable, back

Pipeline and rendering

SOLARIS · USD · HUSK

The Solaris stage is exported as a single flattened USD per shot, then rendered on the school farm with husk.
Farm issues solved: "No cameras found" (SOP Import layer save paths had split the export into several files), texture paths that only resolved locally (fixed with relative asset paths and a matching folder layout), and render settings tuned for refraction depth and firefly control on the gold.
Final edit assembled with ffmpeg.

Solaris network with cameras, render settings and the USD ROP for farm export — USD export network

Render-mesh network driven by the simulation with Point Deform — Render mesh network

What I'd do next

Amber glass-eye irises built in Copernicus (COPs).
More wrinkles at the elbows and armpits, with a Wrinkle Deformer or a finer sleeve mesh.
A smoother platform and a wider backdrop curve, so the floor fades into the wall.

HOW THE FINAL EVOLVED

First submitted final with the shorter kurta — First final (v1)

Earlier final with an orbiting camera and a blue-grey studio background — Previous final (v2)

Final four-view lookdev review on the dark platform — Final

Credits

TEDDY BEAR MODEL: Provided by the course
FACULTY: Prof. Timothy Steele
PEER FEEDBACK: VFX 440 classmates
TEXTURE PATTERNS: Patterns made in Adobe Photoshop

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