Brigham Young University | Center for Animation

The BYU Animation program has 5 faculty members and accepts about 35 students a year who are taking our classes (total 110 students).

There are two limited enrollment programs for our students to get involved with animation classes:

• Animation BFA: This major focuses on the arts of creating CG content, animation, and games. It has been ranked yearly in the top 20 animation schools in the nation by Animation Career Review.

• Computer Science BS, with an Emphasis in Animation and Games: Students become well versed in both programming and in the arts as part of this emphasis, which is a perfect combination for gaining expertise in Houdini! Animation Career Review has ranked this multiple times as the #1 BS in animation in the US.

Our program first provides students a broad principles and skills applicable to computer animation and video game pipelines. We not only want them to develop skills and know what is possible, but also dig under the hood of the techniques and process. From there, students are also able to focus in on beginning to master portions of the pipeline. For example, character creation, character animation, FX, or environment creation.

Houdini serves a strong part of this purpose not only because it is a top-of-the-line software in the industry, but also because it helps students to better understand underlying principles of the tools. It opens doors into the industry for skills such as FX, procedural tools, environments, lighting, and rendering.

Houdini is the backbone of our senior film project pipelines. We use Houdini Engine on our senior video game projects.

We also have a few graduate students doing research with Houdini as the application where they build plugins to program their research. We had technical publications with this work at SIGGRAPH Asia in 2019 and 2021.