Presentations: Houdini HIVE at SIGGRAPH

The Houdini HIVE at SIGGRAPH 2017 included three days of educational sessions in a wide variety of topics. A big THANK YOU to all of the great presenters who are sharing their knowledge with the Houdini community!

DAY ONE  |  AUGUST 1  |  CHARACTER AND ANIMATION  |  VFX

The VFX in "Attraction" | Mikhail Lesin | Main Road|Post

Mikhail provides in-depth details of VFX production for Attraction. He goes right from the early stage of pre-production through all the fascinating effects. How they generate an authentic city and then destroy it, develop design of alien exoskeleton and spaceship, make genuine clouds and atmosphere, and why they needed to make a CG fighter pilot. At the end you will hear how they adjusted their work principles to accomplish all this with a relatively small team of 50 people in just 1 year.

Getting Started with Grains | Rob Stauffer | SideFX

In this class Rob covers the basics of working with grains.  He looks at using shelf tools for setting up dry and wet sand along with clumping and constraints.

Crowds | Cameron White | SideFX

Cameron's presentation focuses on Houdini's tools for simulating crowd agents as ragdolls. Topics covered include: best practices for setting up collision geometry and joint limits, crowd solver integration, heightfields, and more.

Rigging and Muscles | Scott Keating | SideFX

In this talk, Scott covers a variety of rigging methods inside of Houdini, from Auto-Rigging to custom networks. From there, he covers a variety of techniques for adding muscles to your character and simulating the result.

Animating using CHOPS and Constraints | Guillaume Laferriere | SideFX

In this Masterclass, Guillaume presents how to use the Constraints introduced in Houdini 16.0 to animate characters. He covers how to re-parent objects during animation, how to animate a rolling cube procedurally and how to make a character walk on a path. This session focuses mainly on CHOPs and will also introduce you to the new CHOP transform handles and the CHOP Channel Wrangles.

Boolean or not Boolean: Fun with Fracturing | Steve Knipping

Steven Knipping of the Applied Houdini video tutorial series talks about Houdini 16's new workflows for making awesome looking fractures faster and easier! He discusses how to art direct certain material looks and when to use booleans, voronoi, for loops and more!

DAY TWO  |  AUGUST 2  |  GAMES & VR

Procedural Scattering in Houdini Engine and Unity | John Moncrief | Pluralsight

Pluralsight's John Moncrief demonstrates an advanced scatter tool created using Houdini Engine for Unity. This session will take you through building a tool that will randomize and scatter assets (like trees or rocks) based on several different factors including slope calculations, curve based boundaries, and other procedural info read in from a Unity terrain.

Houdini 16 Games Tools Updates | Luiz Kruel and Michael Lyndon | SideFX

Luiz and Mike will guide you through the tools and workflows they have developed to make it easier to export data from Houdini to your game engine. The presentation includes an overview of the games rendering pipeline, which informs a lot of the decisions on how to generate and optimize content. It is essential viewing for Houdini TDs transitioning from film to games.

Procedural Level Building in UE4 | Rob Magee | SideFX

In his session, Robert will show how you can create procedural assets in Houdini that can be used to build game levels in UE4. He will talk about how to create these assets in Houdini's node-based environment and how to deploy them using the Houdini Engine for UE4 plug-in.

Castle VR Overview | Rob Stauffer | SideFX

Here we will take a look at the assets and work flows used to create a VR game in unity. We will look at the assets we created and how they were incorporated in the game, including Houdini Engine.

Virtual Authenticity: Houdini for VR Storytelling | Winslow Porter | New Reality Co.

New Reality Co., creators of the critically-acclaimed cinematic VR drama Giant and the haptically enhanced follow-up piece Tree, will expand upon their utilization of Houdini to finesse virtual environments with photorealistic 3D assets. Co-founder Winslow Porter will detail the history of NRC’s partnership with SideFX and the process of rendering Houdini’s high-quality animations, aiding the audience’s immersion into VR.

Procedural Rock Formations for UE4 | Saber Jlassi

Creating procedural rock formation and cliffs can be very challenging due to all the complex natural patterns (layering, cracks, sharp edges). Using Houdini VDB volumes and voronoi fracturing, Houdini instructor Saber Jlassi shows how this problem can be solved to create all kinds of complex rock formation. After creating the highres meshes we will learn how to generate the game friendly version and bake all the maps needed to make a realistic looking environment in Unreal Engine.

DAY THREE  |  AUGUST 3  |  CORE

Sneak Peek - TopoBuild 3.0 | Fianna Wong

H16 was recently released only a few months ago, but we are already working on new tools. SideFX's Fianna Wong gives you a sneak peek on one of the features coming down the pipe for surfacing tools - specifically the TopoBuild toolset.

Believability in Procedural Modeling | Anastasia Opara

Humans, are great pattern recognition machines, who face astonishing amount of complexity on a daily basis. We are so good at dealing with it, that we do not directly register how exactly this happens, yet when something is off, we immediately ‘feel’ it. Procedural modelling is, in a way, like painting, where complexity emerges from the interaction of simple rules. Thus, we can achieve great intricacy and believability from layering the simplest rules if we analyse correctly our own thought patterns.

Lighting and Rendering | Scott Keating

SideFX's Scott Keating covers some of Mantra's new rendering capabilities and how to take advantage of the new Material workflows in Houdini 16. From there, we will look at how to take advantage of Material Style Sheets when assigning materials and assembling your scene.

Procedural Modelling/LookDev | Matt Ebb

Why use Houdini's perfectly good renderer when you can make your own weird substitute (inside Houdini)? Matt will show how a little bit of rendering knowledge can be dangerously useful. Using Houdini's Surface Operators and VEX, we'll go on a journey from foolish early experiments, to handcrafted rendering and shading tools that were used to tackle some tricky briefs in recent blockbuster films.

DAY THREE  |  AUGUST 3  |  STUDENTS/NEW USERS

A Day in the Life of a Studio Artist | Industry Panel

SideFX Intern Project | Feather Tools | Tighe Rzankowski

A talk on procedural tools created in Houdini for generating feathers, creating wings and applying feathers to a bird.

The Secret Language of Houdini | Robert Magee

When Houdini artists talk, it can seem like they are speaking in a secret language. In this session, SideFX's Robert Magee teaches you how easy it is to understand "Houdini-speak" while learning how a node-based procedural workflow can support your film, TV and gamedev projects.

How to get a Job | Industry Panel

Are you looking to land a career in Visual Effect and Animation? In this panel we are joined by leading industry recruiters who will tell you everything you will need to know in order to make a great first impression, get your reel ready to show off, and more. Moderated by Ian Failes. Panelists include Peter Claes from the Mill, Gavin Graham and Peter Bowmar from Double Negative, and Vincent Serritella from Pixar.