Call the COPs, my Terrain is Rocking Out!  

Harness the power and flexibility of COPs to generate terrain inside Houdini. Learn how to create custom tools that facilitate terrain creation and fine-tuning. Explore ground breaking ideas (pun intended) for texture synthesis, using the newest COP noises and filters. Finalize your terrain with the new HeightField Erosion toolkit.

Layers upon layers of fun!

Dmitrii Vlasenko joined SideFX as an intern where he made launch content. Now Dmitrii is back as a 3D Artist working on.... more launch content. When not crafting terrains or making more launch content, he can be found running out of vram - while making more launch content.             

CFX | Muscle and Soft Tissue with Otis

Take an in-depth look at the latest advancements in Houdini’s Character FX workflows, featuring Otis—a powerful new GPU-accelerated dynamics solver purpose-built for soft tissue simulation. Otis combines the speed of Vellum with the material accuracy of FEM, delivering unprecedented realism for muscle, fascia, fat, and tissue interactions.

Robust volumetric collisions and constraint systems now support fully integrated muscle and tissue simulation, dramatically reducing setup time while improving physical fidelity and anatomical plausibility. Learn about machine learning–driven deformation using updated models tailored for anatomical characters—enabling faster, high-quality results with minimal manual input. 

Procedural muscle deintersections, volume adjustments, and dynamic muscle flexing are easier than ever to configure. Quasi-static skin sliding eliminates the need for a separate simulation pass for skin deformation. Together, these improvements make production-ready results not just achievable, but intuitive, efficient, and artist-friendly.

Kai Stavginski is a self-taught VFX artist and programmer. He began his career working as a rigger in feature animation, then joined DNEG in London, contributing to projects like Man of Steel, John Carter of Mars, Inception, and Jupiter Ascending, specializing in Houdini VFX. Since 2014, he has been at SideFX Software, where he has played a pivotal role in developing toolsets for fur & hair grooming, feathers, and most recently muscle & tissue simulation. His work blends technical problem-solving with creative solutions, and he enjoys exploring new ways to improve VFX workflows.             

Project Outback | Exploring Facial Rigging Techniques in KineFX/APEX  

Learn all about Project Outback as a vehicle to explore Houdini's KineFX rigging and animation tools. Start by learning about KineFX and APEX and what was achieved during the first phase of Project Outback. For the second phase, the focus will be on facial rigging. Learn the difference between a facial rig built for a realistic character and one built for a stylized/cartoon character. Explore a variety of facial rigging techniques and how they can be implemented in KineFX.

Carlos Valcárcel was first trained in computer engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal and continued his studies in computer graphics and 3D Animation at Centre NAD where he began his learning journey in the field of character creation. Since then, he has been specializing in rigging for over 20 years, while continuously pursuing a technical and artistic training. Having worked with many animation softwares, Carlos is always trying to move away from the limitations of current systems and tries to anticipate the future needs of character animation. In his free time, he uses his experience to mentor students and to develop rigging and animation tools for Houdini, where he believes greater work can be achieved in a better way.             

Cookies and Cream | An Exploration of the MPM Solver   

Join me as we prepare a tasty hot drink made up of cookies, milk, sugar, coffee and caramel. This will showcase multiple simulation setups, different approaches and gotchas with different material types in MPM. Learn how meshing MPM sims is a breeze with the new Neural Surface SOP. 

Explore the advances made to the MPM solver and new SOP tools and workflows used to implement it. The main focus will be on the multiple material type interactions in the MPM solver, two way interaction and material transitions. Learn how solids and liquids work together, and how to apply surface tension, plasticity and emission expansion, all at once.

Every shot will be exported to USD and assembled in Solaris for rendering with Karma XPU. We will look into new Whitewater XPU shader, motion blurred volumes, volumetric specular, new rendering properties and AOVs.

Peter Sanitra is a Houdini generalist who specializes in simulation, USD workflows and rendering. Peter currently works as FX artist at Nvidia.             

Building Machine Learning Pipelines  

Learn how to build supervised ML pipelines in Houdini 21. Explore the ML nodes and features that have been added with Houdini 21. These ML nodes are designed to both leverage and enhance Houdini's proceduralism with fully automated end-to-end ML pipelines that include data generation, training and inference. 

 Houdini's ML nodes can be used to perform sub-tasks that are common to a variety of machine learning applications. This can save you a lot of work when you're creating your own machine learning pipeline. Among other things, the ML nodes support example generation, preprocessing, saving & loading data sets, neural-network training, and inference. We show how the ML nodes were used to build ML applications that are being released as part of Houdini 21. These applications include a volume upresser that can be applied to pyro sims and an improved character deformer.

Michiel Hagedoorn is a Senior 3D Scientist at SideFX Software. He currently works on ML tools and various ML-related projects. His other work at SideFX includes computational geometry, soft-body dynamics and character FX. Michiel has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Utrecht University and was a post-doc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. His research areas included computer vision and proximity search. In addition to that, Michiel was a game-engine developer at Digital Extremes, where he worked on real-time physics and game AI. Michiel has been passionate about math, programming and computer graphics from an early age..             

How To Train Your Flame   

Learn how to incorporate machine‑learning enhancements into your Pyro FX workflows. Make your simulations look 3x better by using Houdini 21's procedural machine learning tools.

Jeff Guttin likes chess, caffeine, and 96GB graphics cards in Dell Workstations.              

What's New in COPland?    

Copernicus offers an entirely new context for GPU-accelerated image processing. For Houdini 21, the team has been busy expanding its functionality to create new possibilities for artists and tool developers.  From newly-added nodes and interactive workflows, to baking and material blending: there are lots of new tools available in Copernicus. 

Learn about powerful constructs such as cables and live simulations, including brand new solvers implemented within the Copernicus framework. Take a look into improvements to slap comp, where Copernicus and Solaris work together to get the most out of the viewport--or to stylize its look completely unique.

Omar Zarifi is a senior software developer at SideFX Software. Over the past 8 years at the company, Omar has worked in a wide range of domains, such as fluid simulations, realtime rendering, and general purpose GPU programming. Presently, his work primarily revolves around development of Copernicus, a framework for GPU-accelerated image processing. His many academic interests include pure mathematics, physics-based animation, high-performance computing, and computer graphics. At the intersection of these interests lie Omar's overarching goals of facilitating use of compute and mathematics as expressive tools for artists.             

Making orizuru: quadremesh> unsubdivide> uvflattenfrompoints> new COPs goodies    

Washi washi! Yep, I also saw those fancy Vellum sims out there, folding a grid into crispy origamis. This is not a presentation about that :) Last year, COPs made its debut as a beta and we undoubtedbly have some new goodies for you to play with. There are also additions to SOP tools that I'll also call out, and getting some final pixels via Solaris too. Wow, has it been 12 months already??

Fianna Wong is Technical Marketing Lead at SideFX. She splits her time between intern-herding, vigorous handwaving in the office, making trade-offs with R&D and occupying the space between the chair and keyboard. She is based in Toronto, Canada.            

[Recording will be available at a later date] 

Solaris | A Primer on Primitive Patterns    

Working with prim patterns is a fundamental part of unlocking Solaris. Learn the basics of prim patterns, powerful auto-collections, and crafting patterns to be efficient. At the same time, we will explore the new auto-collections part of Houdini 21.

Chris Rydalch has worked in feature animation for the last 10 years. Most of that time has been spent in production as a character simulation, crowds, and FX TD at Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky Studios. His most recent role at Blue Sky was Production Technology TD, where he helped roll out a new pipeline based around USD. Today he works at SideFX in the R&D group, primarily focused on workflows and tools for Solaris and Karma.