Houdini HIVE at GDC 2020

SideFX is looking forward to meeting you at GDC this year! 

SideFX is bringing the Houdini HIVE to GDC on March 18-20 with educational and inspiring presentations by both SideFX technical experts and industry professionals. Join us at the HIVE to discover how game studios use Houdini's procedural software to create content for games, virtual worlds and more.

HOUDINI HIVE LOCATION:

MEET WITH SIDEFX:

Studios looking to meet with SideFX during GDC can make arrangements directly with your SideFX Account Executive or contact us at sales@sidefx.com. These meetings will take place right beside the HIVE in either room 112 or 113.

HIVE PRESENTATION SCHEDULE:

WEDNESDAY MARCH 18

10:00 AM | Wednesday | March 18 >> SOP-Based Dynamics for Games 

This session will break down the new trend of SOPs based workflows for creating dynamic simulations in Houdini. We will discuss the thinking behind the new Vellum, Pyro, and RBD Bullet workflows in SOPs, and see how these tools work hand in hand with specific “SideFX Labs” workflows to export data for use in game engines.

11:00 AM | Wednesday | March 18 >> Making of the Diablo IV Cinematic FX: The Summoning of Lilith

Learn how FX artists at Blizzard Entertainment used Houdini to create the FX for Lilith's summoning scene in the Diablo IV Cinematic revealed at BlizzCon 2019. Get an in-depth look into the growth system used for the formation of the gateway and how vellum was used to destroy it as Lilith tears her way through.

11:30 AM | Wednesday | March 18 >> Lucen: Indie gamedev with Houdini and UE4 
A breakdown of how Houdini is being used as the primary DCC for creating game assets in Lucen, a solo developed indie title. From modeling, to animation, to VFX and Houdini engine, this presentation covers the ins and outs of how Houdini is being used in all facets of Lucen’s game asset creation. 

1:00 PM | Wednesday | March 18 >> “Cine Tracer” Solo UE4 Game Dev Pipeline
Matt Workman is the developer of a real time app/game hybrid called “Cine Tracer” that enables filmmakers to visualize their films in pre-production.  Matt uses Unreal Engine 4 and recently switched from Maya/Blender to Houdini.  He breaks down his process of learning Houdini and integrating it into his solo developer pipeline.

2:00 PM | Wednesday | March 18 >> Modeling & UI Updates (SUPERDRY edition) 

Too lazy to read the docs and want to satisfy your inner schadenfreude? Then check out this presentation where I will go over some of the modeling SOP and UI updates, as well as some general workflow stuff on hardsurface sketching in Houdini (in a live demo).

2:30 PM | Wednesday | March 18  >> Procedural Tools for Data Handling
I will be covering reconstructing game data in Houdini, pipeline tools to create an asset bank, Custom LOD HDA, PDG destruction testing.

3:30 PM | Wednesday | March 18  >> WaveFunctionCollapse Supercharged with PDG for Level Generation
The WaveFunctionCollapse algorithm is an amazing piece of tech that can greatly increase your workflow in bitmap generation, level generation and overall content creation. In this talk we will explore how to expand upon this using Houdini's massive toolkit of built-in tools.  See how you can use PDG to parallelize content creation and supercharge creative workflows for artists.

4:00 PM | Wednesday | March 18  >> Get Rid Of The Boring In Your Pipeline: How We Got Started  
In this talk, Florian and Clemens will talk about poly-reduction of stylized hair, stylized hair workflow, going from Houdini to Unity with PDG and without Houdini Engine. They will also talk about High-to-low modeling pipeline, from ZBrush to Houdini to Substance, and Batch processing skinned meshes FBX with PDG.     

5:00 PM | Thursday | March 19  >> Destruction Tools and Techniques Used For Borderlands 3
This session will present an overview of the destruction techniques used for creating game-ready assets.  It will cover problems that were experienced during production and what subnetworks and tools were created to solve them. These problems range from generating simple consistent debris, to translating complicated rigid body simulation into shader data, accelerated by the gpu. This session is intended for tech and visual effects artists of all levels who are interested in destruction simulation.

THURSDAY | MARCH 19

10:00 AM | Thursday | March 19  >> Let Artists Be Artists
Artists frequently spend much of their time performing repetitive tasks or creating things to support their art, such as collision geometry, occluders, and LODs, to name a few. Houdini can be used as a studio-wide tool to give this time back to your artists and enable them to spend that time actually making art. This presentation will discuss methods to design these tools to fit your artist's needs and some ways to make these tools more accessible for your artists.

11:00 AM | Thursday | March 19 >> Managing Multi-faceted VFX between Houdini and UE4 

As games become more ambitious, so does the complexity of the VFX setups. Mike will run through how to setup a mutli-faceted effect in Houdini as well as tips and tricks for importing and maintaining the quality of those effects in UE4 and Niagara.  

11:30 AM | Thursday | March 19  >> It Just Needs to Work On Paper | Houdini R&D for Real-time
This talk is about the adventure and lessons learned at Schell Games where we developed an art-directable, high-performance crowd pipeline from Houdini to Unreal that can render thousands of characters in real time. We will also delve into the investment and return of creating a pipeline of HDAs to streamline our destruction workflow. Technical examples will be presented to show how Houdini's customizability enabled us to prototype and find creative solutions to problems.

2:00 PM | Thursday | March 19  >> Tips and tricks for improving VR Game Dev Workflows 
Making a VR action game from start to finish with a team of 3 is more than challenging! However, with the power of Houdini, Vex, Python and some imagination, it's entirely possible. In this talk, Maria will share handy tips and tricks for improving many aspects of virtual reality game development workflows such as making concept art sketches, optimizing visual effects, generating procedural characters, rapidly iterating on level designs and even creating and rendering game key art.

2:30 PM | Thursday | March 19  >> Large Scale, Persisted Multiplayer Worlds using Houdini: Just throw Python at it
The guys at Directive Games give a high-level overview of how they built a Houdini centric pipeline for their upcoming game "Enter the Construct". The talk will focus on how they use Houdini for day-to-day tasks as well as world and asset generation. They will also talk about Kamo, a middleware solution developed by Directive games that solves many of the problems faced by modern large scale MMOs and how they leveraged Houdini to generate the data Kamo uses.

3:30 PM | Thursday | March 19  >> Make your Artists Love You
Workshop on creating your own PyPanel HDA’s and quality of life tips and tricks.

4:00 PM | Thursday | March 19  >> Crafting Procedural Assets for Unity and Unreal
Building environments for games involves many steps from initial modeling to establishing the game-readiness of each asset. In this talk, Simon will introduce techniques that can be used by game artists to create procedural assets that have modeling, uv unwrapping, and baking built in. These assets can then be loaded into game editors such as Unity and Unreal using the Houdini Engine plug-in technology to maintain their procedural nature. Whether you are an indie artist or work at a AAA studio, these smart assets let you quickly art direct a level inside the game editor with the confidence that you are always generating game-ready art.

5:00 PM | Thursday | March 19  >> Procedural Modelling For Grid-Based Games  
A behind-the-scenes look at how Houdini was used to generate level art for an isometric game developed in UE4. This talk will showcase techniques for automatically exporting 3D grid data from Unreal and importing it into Houdini to generate fully-realized levels.

FRIDAY | MARCH 20

10:00 AM | Thursday | March 20  >> Creating reactive environments for CONTROL
CONTROL features a lot of reactive environments and destruction. The talk outlines the procedural workflows used to build the rich and engaging environments and the use of Houdini in the process.

11:00 AM | Thursday | March 20  >> The Secret Language of Houdini for Games
Soppity, Dop, Top, Lop…. When Houdini artists talk, it can seem like they are speaking in their own secret language. In this session, Robert explores how easy it is to understand "Houdini-speak" while introducing the different ways that a node-based procedural workflow can support your gamedev projects. Along the way, you will learn about the different types of nodes, networks and assets that you can create in Houdini and how they all work together.