Tilghman Wendel - NEW_A Brief History

Person of the internet,

My name's Tilghman, and my job is to cook, bake, and drip pixels for juggernauts like HBO, Twitch, and Red Bull. One day I realized that sifting my hands through rice is about as satisfying as pushing rocks around a simulation. I decided to pursue a career in one of those, and fake the other.

The website you're staring at is a brochure for a flying sushi temple, the first of its kind. The reason I created a fake establishment was to veer away from making senseless spec animations, and instead build the restaurant of my dreams - the Torched Gold Sushi Temple.

As a lifelong student of illustration, film-making, and lettering - I began studying my parent's signatures as a kid. I was naturally drawn to elements of design while never pursuing it head-on. Fast-forward a few Playstations, and my work has encompassed animated typography, sports packages, motion graphics, and, of course, dynamics.

I usually find myself driven by invention - a first act engineer of sorts. I use design as a tool for escaping practical development, never taking it past the drawing boards. Somewhere along the way, I began exploring 3D programs to achieve motion that was elsewhere undoable. Early in the pandemic, I rewired my brain to the likes of the mythical Houdini, committing my focus to FX.

When I'm not burning holes in my eyes, I enjoy snowboarding, riding my bike, and making sushi. I also like taking the occasional directing gig, drawing on paper, and screenwriting.

FX and Focus

^

Particles, Grains, and Rigid Body Dynamics

Stackable sand, snow, and gold bits with deformed colliders.

Temporally de-intersected rigid bodies with organic transformations.

Explicit Motion Graphics

Getting across the finish line when other DCCs struggle.

Propagated growth systems, temporal masking, and custom velocity fields.

Extensive instance control for modeling, UVs, motion, large-scale scenes, and data wrangling.

Fluid Effects

Small-scale, high-viscosity simulations including slow-motion and bubbles.

Volumetrics and Fields

Vapor, smoke, clouds, VDB boolean reveals, and SDF modeling.

Cloth, Wire, Grass, and Electricity

All things Vellum, soft-body simulations with colliders, and procedural constraints.

Procedural Modeling

Infinitely random variations using VEX scripting and sub-networks.

Graphic and FX Integration

Merging dimensions (2D and 3D) through dynamics and in-render compositing.

Procedural vector modeling for bitmaps, type, and hero assets.

Proficiencies

6

SideFX Houdini

Preferred DCC for modeling, 3D motion, and FX.

Familiar with Solaris (USD) pipeline. Rendering Redshift and learning Karma XPU.

Maxon Cinema 4D

My relationship with Cinema has lasted longer than 30% of American marriages.

Rendering Redshift & Octane.

Adobe Suite

The usual suspects, plus a bit of Substance.

Yes, I'm one of those Houdini guys who loves After Effects.

The Foundry Nuke

Basic understanding of multi-pass compositing and color grading.

Comfortable within Nuke pipelines, but not pretending to be a wizard.

Procreate and Rough Animator

Primary tools for previz, animatics, sketching, and the occasional cel animation.

Artificial Intelligence

For better or worse, I haven't used generative A.I. in any intentional capacity.

I do use (and mostly recommend) A.I. for debugging VEX, Python, and just about any programming language.

In the past, I've used A.I. for upscaling, duplicate frame removal, and photo fills.