June 19-20 | 8 am - 5 pm

Escape Studios | 190 High Holborn, London WC1V 7BH 

Solaris is Houdini’s environment for layout, lookdev and lighting which provides a great environment for building an artist-friendly pipeline. Learn how you can transfer your skills to Houdini and take advantage of Solaris and its node-based workflow. 

Each workshop is 2 days in length and is designed for either artists new to Houdini or existing Houdini artists. Each workshop comes with breakfast and lunch on both days, a Houdini t-shirt and the Houdini Foundations book.

New to Houdini > WORKSHOP 1 | SOLARIS UNLOCKED | Moeen & Mujtaba Sayed 

Existing Houdini Artist > WORKSHOP 2 | USD AUTHORING | Peter Arcara

WORKSHOP 1 | SOLARIS IS SWEET

This hands-on, artist-oriented workshop is designed for 3D professionals who are new to Houdini. Learn the fundamentals of Houdini Solaris for look development, lighting, and layout –plus the basics of Universal Scene Description (USD), the industry-standard file system for flexible and collaborative workflows. The main focus will be to transfer your existing skills to the Solaris context in Houdini. As part of the practical aspect of this workshop, you will put together a scene whilst being guided along to become confident with shading, lighting and rendering within Solaris.

DAY 1 | Get acquainted with the Solaris interface and learn how to import assets, prepare shaders, work with lights and light mixers, and adjust camera settings. You will also get hands-on experience with Houdini's native renderer, Karma. By the end of the day, you'll apply what you've learned to a project using a given set of assets.

DAY 2 | Dive deeper into Solaris by exploring alternative shaders like MaterialX, integrating third-party renderers, and utilizing advanced camera settings. Learn how to prepare shaders for instances and volumes, and create a complete Solaris scene with guidance from our expert instructors.

WORKSHOP NOW ONLINE

Course fee includes two days of breakfast and lunch – plus swag, and a Houdini Foundations printed training manual.

Lecturer

Moeen Sayed is a Visual Effects Artist from South Africa. He co-founded the VFXStudio, Nine Between, with his brother, Mujtaba. Moeen currently works in film, television and commercials, having worked with Xiaomi, Netflix and a wide range of broadcasting networks such as Discovery Channel and the History Channel. Additionally, he teaches Houdini at various levels, with his YouTube series “Houdini Isn’t Scary” and “VEX Isn’t Scary” having been viewed by hundreds of thousands of aspiring artists.

Course Designer

Mujtaba Sayed is a Visual Effects Artist, Videographer, 3D Generalist and the Co-founder of Nine Between. Mujtaba currently works in film, television and commercials,having worked with Xiaomi, Netflix and a wide range of broadcasting networks such as Discovery Channel and the History Channel. With a background in photography, his role inlighting and rendering for NineBetween is invaluable. Additionally, as a generalist, he has abroad understanding of other 3D packages and their use in 3D and VFX pipelines. He is the sole creator of the “Beautiful Game” chess piece assets which have been used as a testing set for MaterialX development in different render engines.

WORKSHOP 2 | USD AUTHORING

This workshop is for current Houdini users that want a deeper understanding of what is going on “under-the-hood” with USD while working in Solaris.

Day 1 | Learn how to create a practical example of working with USD assets, layout, and randomizing variants. We’ll use a PDG-based USD asset generator to create assets then scatter them into the scene. This scene will serve as a basis for a conversation into the inner workings of USD and the files written to disk. Throughout the creation of the USD assets, you will learn the recommended asset hierarchy detailed by the ASWF.

Day 2 | The workshop will continue through both practical and academic examples of working with USD. Open the ASCII USD files and discuss topics such as: sublayer vs. reference, layering, instancing, variants, writing and stitching animation, and “_class_” inherits. When finished with this workshop, you will have a much deeper understanding of how to use Solaris, and what you are writing to disk in your USD files.

NOW ONLINE

Course fee includes two days of breakfast and lunch – plus swag, and a Houdini Foundations printed training manual.

Instructor

Peter Arcara is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. He loves watching rocket launches and F1 races in his free time.