Join us for two days of learning, inspiration, and networking with the Houdini community at Houdini HIVE Equinox in Toronto. Whether you're an experienced Houdini artist or just getting started, Equinox brings together artists, technical directors, educators, and industry professionals to share production techniques, workflows, and the latest developments in Houdini.
LOCATION: One King West Hotel & Residence Toronto, ON
This is a live event. Presentations will be recorded where possible. Workshops will not be recorded.
MONDAY | SEPT 21
DAY 1 | TUESDAY | SEPT 22
3:10 PM
Bahador Mehrpouya | RodeoFX
6:05 PM
More details to come!
DAY 2 | WEDNESDAY | SEPT 23
2:40 PM
More details to come!
Ville Vaajakallio | Anima Vitae Point
3:20 PM
Alexandre Scott & Timucin Ozger | Untold Studios
DAY 1 | TUESDAY | SEPT 22
WORKSHOP
Introduction to Houdini
TUESDAY | 9 AM - 12 PM
Learn how to build your first procedural scene from scratch in Houdini. In this beginner-friendly workshop, participants will explore Houdini’s procedural foundations, including useful UI tips, node-based workflows, procedural modeling, texturing, particles, and attributes.
You’ll also explore how to bring these elements together into a complete scene and prepare it for a final rendered image. This workshop is designed for beginner artists who want a practical and approachable introduction to Houdini’s procedural workflow.
WORKSHOP LEVEL:
Beginner | You are new to Houdini
Alasgar Hasanov is a CG and VFX artist with over a decade of professional industry experience creating high end Houdini effects for film, television, and commercial work. His credits include Doctor Strange, Thor, Ant Man, Ms. Marvel, Game of Thrones, The Boys, and work for brands such as Nike and Dolby Digital. He also has over 7 years of experience teaching Houdini and is a published author of VFX Made Easy With Houdini. Alasgar is currently the Learning Content Lead at SideFX, where he helps shape Houdini education for artists around the world.
WORKSHOP
Machine Learning | Fundamentals of ONNX
TUESDAY | 9 AM - 12 PM
Take a deep dive into using ONNX for machine learning workflows in Houdini. Learn everything from the fundamentals of ONNX inference in SOPs and COPs to using pre-trained models, exporting custom PyTorch models to ONNX, and controlling tensor data for production-ready workflows. By the end, you will be able to run external AI models directly inside Houdini, build and deploy your own ONNX models, automate dataset generation and training workflows with TOPs, and optimize models for real-time performance.
WORKSHOP LEVEL:
Advanced | Proficiency in Houdini and some Python knowledge
Josh Karlin is a Technical Artist at SideFX in Los Angeles. He currently specializes in creating and prototyping machine learning tools and workflows within Houdini, focusing on synthetic data, digital twins, computer vision, and gaussian splats. During his time at SideFX, he has also worked with the SideFX Labs team developing real-time VFX tools and workflows for Unreal Engine.
SideFX Labs | Level Up Your Workflow
Mohamad Salame | SideFX | Tuesday | 2:15 PM
Learn how to upgrade your pipeline with the latest creative tools from SideFX Labs. Learn all about recently released nodes, utilities and explore the SideFX Labs Roadmap.
Mohamad Salame worked in the games industry as an Environment artist and a Technical artist on titles such as Watch Dogs Legion and other indie games.
Now he makes SideFX Labs tools and helps spread the news about Houdini for games.
Magic FX: Beyond the Preset
Rina Okuno | SideFX | Tuesday | 2:40 PM
Explore Houdini 22’s Particles and Magic Trail presets and see how they can be adapted according to your artistic needs. Discover ways to customize the presets for your own magical FX!
Rina Okuno is a Marketing FX Artist Intern at SideFX. After exploring Maya and Houdini while studying VFX fundamentals, she quickly fell in love with Houdini’s procedural approach and its ability to bring magical and fantastical ideas to life. Now in Toronto, she spends her time making FX, exploring new cafes, and convincing herself that she actually enjoys Toronto winters.
Raining Fire: Building the Battle of Tumbleton's Fire Simulation for House of the Dragon Season 3
Bahador Mehrpouya | Rodeo FX| Tuesday | 3:10 PM
In House of the Dragon's third season, dragonfire was put front and center: not as a single dramatic strike, but as a sustained, sky-wide barrage raining down on entire armies. Bahador Mehrpouya, FX Supervisor at Rodeo FX, walks through how the studio's fire simulation pipeline evolved across the season to meet that demand: the technical challenges of scaling fire simulation to battlefield proportions, the look-development choices that gave the battle of Tumbleton its distinct visual signature, and the workflow innovations that let the team deliver believable, large-scale destruction under a punishing episodic schedule.
Bahador Mehrpouya is a veteran FX Supervisor and Department Head with nearly two decades of experience in the visual effects industry. Bahador began his career in 2007, transitioning from classical animation into the world of CG. After a brief start as a modeler, he quickly discovered his passion for dynamic simulations, joining the FX department within six months and adopting SideFX’s Houdini as his primary toolkit in 2009. He spent the first nine years of his career supervising FX departments for animated feature films. Today, Bahador brings his deep technical expertise and creative leadership to high-profile live-action movies and episodic series, guiding teams to deliver world-class visual storytelling.
Let's Get (C)rowdy!
Tom Goffelli | SideFX | Tuesday | 3:50 PM
A quick overview of some quality-of-life updates to the ragdoll setup of crowd agents, along with a little demo crowd project with the almighty Goofy Goober character shown during the keynote and available on the content library.
Tom Goffelli is the kinda guy who spends 3 hours with his friend trying to come up with a clever bio and ends up writing about pigs, huffing paint and owning Taylor Swift merch. When he isn't struggling to write his bio, he works in RnD at SideFX. But really, he just lies awake at night trying to come up with a good bio.
Caws & Effects: Wednesday Season 2
Jethro Au | Rocket Science | Tuesday | 4:15 PM
Take a behind-the-scenes look at the visual effects from Tim Burton's WEDNESDAY Season 2. Explore the creation of One-Eye and his murder of crows, including creature rigging, animation, and Houdini-powered flocking systems used to deliver large-scale, cinematic crow behaviour.
Jethro Au first started his career in comics and graphic design prior to joining the world of visual effects on Sony’s MEN IN BLACK: INTERNATIONAL (d. F Gary Gray) as a Modeler. For over a decade, Au has delivered on high-profile features including TOP GUN: MAVERICK (d. Joseph Kosinski) and Warner Bros. BIRDS OF PREY (d. Cathy Yan), as well as streaming titles such as Rian Johnson’s POKER FACE (Peacock), Eric Kripke’s Emmy Award-winning THE BOYS (Amazon), and its spin-off GEN V (Amazon). Most recently, as CG Supervisor at Rocket Science VFX, Au led teams on SOMETHING VERY BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN (Netflix) and Tim Burton’s critically acclaimed WEDNESDAY (Netflix).
Dawning 2 (Premiere)
Bogdan Amidzic | Crater Studio | Tuesday | 4:45 PM
Years ago, SideFX released the short animated film "Dawning", to showcase new tools like KineFX and Solaris. As all of these tools got more mature, and APEX and Copernicus were released, the idea came to do a sequel for "Dawning". With a gathering of external artists from Crater Studio, SHUBA VFX, SideFX and others, we set the goal of doing everything in Houdini from previz, animation, all the way to FX and rendering - some of which was already shown last year at the 2025 Tokyo HIVE. Today, we will premiere the full shortfilm, as well as show you the whole project setup with Shot Builder Tools, animation with APEX rigs, FX work and how to package it so the lighting team can hande the bulk of shots at the same time.
Bogdan Amidzic has been working in the VFX industry since 2006, across both 2D and 3D departments, primarily at Crater Studio. His artistic background and programming skills eventually led him to dive into the Houdini ecosystem. Over the course of several projects, he was responsible for adopting Houdini as a primary tool and later implementing a USD/Solaris pipeline. More recently, he began teaching as a Houdini instructor at the Crater VFX Training Center and has organized several Houdini user group events.
COPing My MARSterpiece
Dmitrii Vlasenko | SideFX | Tuesday | 5:40 PM
Learn how to generate a convincing Mars surface texture using a COP network in Houdini! Mars is planet. I make planet. Using the Computer.
Dmitrii Vlasenko is a 3D Artist who crunches out content library material at SideFX. He attempts to download more VRAM on a daily basis, but he usually just segfaults. By creating pixels for the best look, Dmitrii creates the best look for his pixels. This rendering aficionado wants all of the lights, because they are never too bright for him.
DAY 2 | WEDNESDAY | SEPT 23
WORKSHOP
Procedural Animation Workflows
WEDNESDAY | 9 AM - 12 PM
Learn how to create a procedural character motion in Houdini 22. In this beginner-friendly workshop, participants will work with a rigged character, learn how to retarget motion capture animations, combine clips with Motion Mixer, enable a simple ragdoll physics and utilize the new character animation features in Houdini 22.
You’ll also explore simple camera creation and rendering techniques to present the final animation. This workshop is designed for beginner artists and gives a practical introduction to Houdini’s modern character motion workflows using KineFX powered by APEX.
WORKSHOP LEVEL:
Beginner | You are new to Houdini
Debra Isaac is the Community Mentor at SideFX. With over a decade of experience teaching Houdini, she gets excited to share her enthusiasm for the software and focuses on encouraging artists to make amazing work with it. Additionally, she is an Adjunct Professor at USC Cinematic Arts, Expanded Animation, and is the founder of Houdini.School. Her community building efforts include co-organizing LAHUG and Houdini Battle.
WORKSHOP
Texturing with Copernicus
WEDNESDAY | 9 AM - 12 PM
Explore how to use Copernicus in Houdini for procedural and hand-painted texturing.
We’ll start by baking a geometry, creating the foundation for our texture. From there, we’ll build a procedural texturing workflow keeping everything flexible and fully editable. We’ll also explore how to manually refine our results using painting tools, combining procedural techniques with hand-painted adjustments to get exactly the look we want.
Whether you’re familiar with Houdini or coming from a more traditional texturing background, this workshop will give you a practical introduction to using COPs for procedural, flexible, and art-directed texturing workflows.
WORKSHOP LEVEL:
Beginner | You are new to Houdini
Sahar Yousefi is a Technical Artist specializing in procedural art, and VFX. She began her professional career as a Technical Artist intern at Ubisoft Paris, working with the R&D team to research and develop new technologies and workflows.
She is passionate about exploring the intersection of art and technology and creating tools and processes that help artists work more efficiently.
My Textures Like to Move It, Move It
Jinho Jeoung | SideFX | Wednesday | 1:00 PM
You don’t need a super-expensive wand to create fancy magic. We can make moving magic right inside COPs. Let’s explore how to create animated textures from scratch in COPs.
Jinho Jeoung is a 3D Software Developer at SideFX. He studied fine art and math. He calls himself a mathemARTician, which is a pun that neither a mathematician nor an artist can enjoy.
Houdini Chaos: Authoring UE5 Geometry Collections
Noboru Garcia | Beyond FX | Wednesday | 1:30 PM
Learn why Houdini is a powerful tool for creating destructible assets in UE5. This presentation will cover how to set up these assets using the native structure of Unreal Engine's Geometry Collection inside Houdini. With this method, users will have access to incredible flexibility in creating detailed fractures using Houdini's extensive library of tools. Let's get cracking!
Noboru Garcia is a Senior VFX Artist at Beyond-FX who has been creating real-time VFX since 2020. His first Houdini class was in 2002 and by 2014 it became his primary DCC package for just about everything. He graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2004 with a BFA in Computer Art and before that he had a passion for modding and editing games since the original release of DOOM (1993).
Biped Retargeting
Kim Bourdette | SideFX | Wednesday | 2:10 PM
Learn how you can use a simple setup to transfer animation from one bipedal character to another. If you've ever retargeted animation using Human IK then this will be a presentation for you.
Kim Bourdette is currently working at SideFX with character animation R&D. Previously he worked for 12 years in the games industry, most recently at Embark Studios where he worked on titles like Arc Raiders and The Finals.
Alien: Earth Creature VFX by Untold Studios
Alexandre Scott & Timucin Ozger | Untold Studios | Wednesday | 3:20 PM
A showcase of Emmy-nominated creature VFX from Alien: Earth with a high-level discussion of creative and technical challenges using SideFX Houdini. There will be lots of slime, blood, guts, and possibly some spoilers. Viewer discretion is advised!
Alexandre Scott is a Television Academy Emmy-nominated VFX Lighting Supervisor at Untold Studios, former Head of Lighting at MPC, and former professor at Seneca College. Driven by a love of photography, he specializes in bringing digital creatures to life on screen by delivering top-tier feature film and episodic lighting and rendering. He has worked on AAA franchises including Spider-Man and Hellboy, as well as other award-winning projects.
Tim Ozger has over 15 years in high-end feature film production and specializes in bridging the gap between artistic vision and technical scalability. Having served as Head of CG and CG Supervisor at studios like MPC and Mr. X, Tim has led teams to deliver world-class VFX for projects like Godzilla vs. Kong, Aquaman, and Justice League.
From 2K to 128: VAT Pipeline Redesign behind Skeletal VAT
Lei Wu | SideFX | Wednesday | 4:00 PM
An explorational breakdown of the Skeletal VAT pipeline for game animation. This talk covers bit-packing and baking bone data in Houdini, then reconstructing skinning matrices at runtime in the engine shader. We’ll trace some experiments and decisions to see how the required texture size was reduced from 2048+ to 128.
Lei Wu is a Lead Tech Art Director overseeing core engine systems and rendering pipelines across art and programming teams, only for this majestic reality to vanish the moment he wakes up. By day, he is just a TA with an architectural background, drawn to cross-system pipelines and creative problems until he falls asleep and reads from the start.
Level Up Your Muscle Transfer
Liesbeth Levick | SideFX | Wednesday | 4:40 PM
Take your anatomical precision to the next level. This talk will show you how to move beyond the Muscle Transfer Recipe basics and gain full control over your character transfer. From fine-tuning bone placement and scaling muscle mass to managing fat distribution, you’ll learn the techniques needed to transfer between vastly different characters with ease. We’ll also cover expert strategies for solving distorted topology, turning technical challenges into seamless, production-ready results.
Liesbeth Levick is a Character Effects Technical Director at Side Effects Software, focusing on Muscles and Tissues. She studied Astrophysics and then moved on to work in grooming and CFX at animation and visual effects studios in South Africa and Canada. Her production experience includes creating tools and workflows for CFX in Houdini and helping transition studios to a Houdini-based CFX pipeline. Her familiarity with both artistic and technical roles drives her to build tools to make the lives of CFX artists easier.
Squirmbox: Approaching Games Like a Houdini Artist
Ben Elliot | Squirmbox | Wednesday | 6:15 PM
Learn how Houdini and the dream of a real-time procedural playground led Ben to create his first game, Squirmbox. Ben will discuss the lofty goals and painful truths of proceduralism and how he used Houdini to make art the easiest part of the development process. Topics discussed: KineFX, geometry processing, refusing to UV characters properly, pig heads, and more!
Ben Elliot is a Brooklyn-based Houdini artist turned game developer and the creator of Squirmbox, a live-performance sandbox game that blends modular synthesis and procedural animation to make expressive interactive visuals. Before games, he spent nine years in VFX specializing in creative simulation. Ben has taught Houdini and thesis development at the School of Visual Arts, guest lectured at Harvard on fabricating imagery, and recently presented Squirmbox at the Game Developers Conference.