Tutorials at Lizard Lounge Graphics Lounge : JENNA v2 NICKL/Proximal

Here's a handy way to use Cidertank's JENNA v2 NICKL plug-in for CINEMA 4DXL v8.1 in conjunction with the Proximal shader to create some super-easy-to-generate procedural models. In its most basic form, Proximal is used to generate material information (usually a gradient map sampled from different types of topology) which can then be used to drive NICKL using the new Material-based function.

A sphere is used to apply a basic NICKL deformation to a plane.

Object Manager hieracrchy for working with NICKL and Proximal.

And the Proximal settings used to create the effect.

I applied the Proximal material to a Jenna v2 UberNull object which was made a child of the Jenna v2 NICKL deformer. I then set the NICKL function to "Material", dragged the material tag from the UberNull into the NICKL material parameter and configured it to use the luminance channel (it's what I used - you can change this if you want). From there it was simply a matter of tweaking NICKL's strength settings and Proximal until I got the results you see here.

What else can you do with this? Recently I was asked by a client to make something look like it was underneath another surface. Since I was not sure what the two pieces of geometry were going to be, it was important to come up with a treatment which could use any two elements. Proximal and Jenna v2 NICKL offered the perfect combination to solve this problem.

A spline is used to locally deform a plane with Proximal and NICKL.

Since one of my objects was made up from splines, I found that I could play with the interpolation of the splines to get the neccessary point density to drive Proximal. In this example I have used one object to influence Proximal; if there were many I would use the "Include Subobjects" option.

Proximal settings used for the above example. Note the End Distance settings.

To get a nice smooth deformation I found that I needed to use a very high interpolation setting on my spline objects. When I used lower settings I found that I got some neat results that were unexpected. I found that Proximal and NICKL could be used to make procedural models in the form of ribbed and ridged hoses. By changing Proximal's Function settings you can make different profiles for your ridges. It always pays to play around with the software and to see just what it might be capable of!

More examples of procedural modeling with Proximal and Jenna v2 NICKL.

Have fun and let me know if you have any questions.