In September, SideFX hosted two days of learning, inspiration, and networking with the Houdini community at Houdini HIVE Equinox in Toronto. Whether you're an experienced Houdini artist or just getting started, Equinox brings together artists, technical directors, educators, and industry professionals to share production techniques, workflows, and the latest developments in Houdini.
Presentations have been recorded where possible and are hosted below. Workshops were not recorded.
Bahador Mehrpouya | RodeoFX
Keynote
SideFX
A comprehensive overview of Houdini 22's latest capabilities, focusing on major advancements across UI/UX Design, Animation, Character FX, and Machine Learning integration.
SideFX Labs | Level Up Your Workflow
Mohamad Salame | SideFX
Learn how to upgrade your pipeline with the latest creative tools from SideFX Labs. Learn all about recently released nodes, utilities and explore the SideFX Labs Roadmap.
Mohamad Salame worked in the games industry as an Environment artist and a Technical artist on titles such as Watch Dogs Legion and other indie games.
Now he makes SideFX Labs tools and helps spread the news about Houdini for games.
Magic FX: Beyond the Preset
Rina Okuno | SideFX
Explore Houdini 22’s Particles and Magic Trail presets and see how they can be adapted according to your artistic needs. Discover ways to customize the presets for your own magical FX!
Rina Okuno is a Marketing FX Artist Intern at SideFX. After exploring Maya and Houdini while studying VFX fundamentals, she quickly fell in love with Houdini’s procedural approach and its ability to bring magical and fantastical ideas to life. Now in Toronto, she spends her time making FX, exploring new cafes, and convincing herself that she actually enjoys Toronto winters.
Raining Fire: Building the Battle of Tumbleton's Fire Simulation for House of the Dragon Season 3
Bahador Mehrpouya | Rodeo FX
In House of the Dragon's third season, dragonfire was put front and center: not as a single dramatic strike, but as a sustained, sky-wide barrage raining down on entire armies. Bahador Mehrpouya, FX Supervisor at Rodeo FX, walks through how the studio's fire simulation pipeline evolved across the season to meet that demand: the technical challenges of scaling fire simulation to battlefield proportions, the look-development choices that gave the battle of Tumbleton its distinct visual signature, and the workflow innovations that let the team deliver believable, large-scale destruction under a punishing episodic schedule.
Bahador Mehrpouya is a veteran FX Supervisor and Department Head with nearly two decades of experience in the visual effects industry. Bahador began his career in 2007, transitioning from classical animation into the world of CG. After a brief start as a modeler, he quickly discovered his passion for dynamic simulations, joining the FX department within six months and adopting SideFX’s Houdini as his primary toolkit in 2009. He spent the first nine years of his career supervising FX departments for animated feature films. Today, Bahador brings his deep technical expertise and creative leadership to high-profile live-action movies and episodic series, guiding teams to deliver world-class visual storytelling.
Let's Get (C)rowdy!
Tom Goffelli | SideFX
A quick overview of some quality-of-life updates to the ragdoll setup of crowd agents, along with a little demo crowd project with the almighty Goofy Goober character shown during the keynote and available on the content library.
Tom Goffelli is the kinda guy who spends 3 hours with his friend trying to come up with a clever bio and ends up writing about pigs, huffing paint and owning Taylor Swift merch. When he isn't struggling to write his bio, he works in RnD at SideFX. But really, he just lies awake at night trying to come up with a good bio.
Caws & Effects: Wednesday Season 2
Jethro Au | Rocket Science VFX
Take a behind-the-scenes look at the visual effects from Tim Burton's WEDNESDAY Season 2. Explore the creation of One-Eye and his murder of crows, including creature rigging, animation, and Houdini-powered flocking systems used to deliver large-scale, cinematic crow behaviour.
Jethro Au first started his career in comics and graphic design prior to joining the world of visual effects on Sony’s MEN IN BLACK: INTERNATIONAL (d. F Gary Gray) as a Modeler. For over a decade, Au has delivered on high-profile features including TOP GUN: MAVERICK (d. Joseph Kosinski) and Warner Bros. BIRDS OF PREY (d. Cathy Yan), as well as streaming titles such as Rian Johnson’s POKER FACE (Peacock), Eric Kripke’s Emmy Award-winning THE BOYS (Amazon), and its spin-off GEN V (Amazon). Most recently, as CG Supervisor at Rocket Science VFX, Au led teams on SOMETHING VERY BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN (Netflix) and Tim Burton’s critically acclaimed WEDNESDAY (Netflix).
VIDEO NOT YET AVAILABLE
Dawning 2 (Premiere)
Bogdan Amidzic | Crater Studio
Years ago, SideFX released the short animated film "Dawning", to showcase new tools like KineFX and Solaris. As all of these tools got more mature, and APEX and Copernicus were released, the idea came to do a sequel for "Dawning". With a gathering of external artists from Crater Studio, SHUBA VFX, SideFX and others, we set the goal of doing everything in Houdini from previz, animation, all the way to FX and rendering - some of which was already shown last year at the 2025 Tokyo HIVE. Today, we will premiere the full shortfilm, as well as show you the whole project setup with Shot Builder Tools, animation with APEX rigs, FX work and how to package it so the lighting team can hande the bulk of shots at the same time.
Bogdan Amidzic has been working in the VFX industry since 2006, across both 2D and 3D departments, primarily at Crater Studio. His artistic background and programming skills eventually led him to dive into the Houdini ecosystem. Over the course of several projects, he was responsible for adopting Houdini as a primary tool and later implementing a USD/Solaris pipeline. More recently, he began teaching as a Houdini instructor at the Crater VFX Training Center and has organized several Houdini user group events.
COPing My MARSterpiece
Dmitrii Vlasenko | SideFX
Learn how to generate a convincing Mars surface texture using a COP network in Houdini! Mars is planet. I make planet. Using the Computer.
Dmitrii Vlasenko is a 3D Artist who crunches out content library material at SideFX. He attempts to download more VRAM on a daily basis, but he usually just segfaults. By creating pixels for the best look, Dmitrii creates the best look for his pixels. This rendering aficionado wants all of the lights, because they are never too bright for him.
My COPs Like to Move It, Move It
Jinho Jeoung | SideFX
You don’t need a super-expensive wand to create fancy magic. We can make moving magic right inside COPs. Let’s explore how to create animated magic portals from scratch in COPs.
Jinho Jeoung is a 3D Software Developer at SideFX. He studied fine art and math. He calls himself a mathemARTician, which is a pun that neither a mathematician nor an artist can enjoy.
Houdini Chaos: Authoring UE5 Geometry Collections
Noboru Garcia | Beyond FX
Learn why Houdini is a powerful tool for creating destructible assets in UE5. This presentation will cover how to set up these assets using the native structure of Unreal Engine's Geometry Collection inside Houdini. With this method, users will have access to incredible flexibility in creating detailed fractures using Houdini's extensive library of tools. Let's get cracking!
Noboru Garcia is a Senior VFX Artist at Beyond-FX who has been creating real-time VFX since 2020. His first Houdini class was in 2002 and by 2014 it became his primary DCC package for just about everything. He graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2004 with a BFA in Computer Art and before that he had a passion for modding and editing games since the original release of DOOM (1993).
Biped Retargeting
Kim Bourdette | SideFX
Learn how you can use a simple setup to transfer animation from one bipedal character to another. If you've ever retargeted animation using Human IK then this will be a presentation for you.
Kim Bourdette is currently working at SideFX with character animation R&D. Previously he worked for 12 years in the games industry, most recently at Embark Studios where he worked on titles like Arc Raiders and The Finals.
Just Draw a Curve: Building bridges in Houdini
Ville Vaajakallio
| Anima Vitae Point
A train travelling through the clouds needs a railway bridge that builds itself stone by stone ahead of the train — and disappears behind it. The catch: with concept art and production happening partly in parallel, nobody knew exactly where the railway would eventually be used.
This talk explores a Houdini system designed around that uncertainty. The artist-facing controls were reduced to drawing a curve and adding two animation keyframes, allowing a completely new bridge animation to be created in around 30 minutes.
We'll look under the hood at the procedural modelling and animation setup, along with how COPs, reaction-diffusion patterns and point-driven displacement in Karma were used to add detail to the final bridge.
Ville Vaajakallio is a CG Supervisor at Anima Vitae Point, with a career in visual effects spanning more than three decades. Starting out in the early days of VFX in Finland, he became one of the country’s early digital effects artists, working across commercials and some of the first VFX-driven Finnish film productions before gradually moving into VFX supervision. A lifelong tinkerer, he has always gravitated toward building his own tools and finding unconventional technical solutions to visual problems — an approach that eventually made Houdini a natural home for him more than a decade ago. After a few years working on a VR collaboration platform, he returned to film and now focuses on the artistic and technical challenges of CG animated feature production.
VIDEO NOT YET AVAILABLE
Alien: Earth Creature VFX by Untold Studios
Alexandre Scott & Timucin Ozger | Untold Studios
A showcase of Emmy-nominated creature VFX from Alien: Earth with a high-level discussion of creative and technical challenges using SideFX Houdini. There will be lots of slime, blood, guts, and possibly some spoilers. Viewer discretion is advised!
Alexandre Scott is a Television Academy Emmy-nominated VFX Lighting Supervisor at Untold Studios, former Head of Lighting at MPC, and former professor at Seneca College. Driven by a love of photography, he specializes in bringing digital creatures to life on screen by delivering top-tier feature film and episodic lighting and rendering. He has worked on AAA franchises including Spider-Man and Hellboy, as well as other award-winning projects.
Tim Ozger has over 15 years in high-end feature film production and specializes in bridging the gap between artistic vision and technical scalability. Having served as Head of CG and CG Supervisor at studios like MPC and Mr. X, Tim has led teams to deliver world-class VFX for projects like Godzilla vs. Kong, Aquaman, and Justice League.
From 2K to 128: VAT Pipeline Redesign behind Skeletal VAT
Lei Wu | SideFX
An explorational breakdown of the Skeletal VAT pipeline for game animation. This talk covers bit-packing and baking bone data in Houdini, then reconstructing skinning matrices at runtime in the engine shader. We’ll trace some experiments and decisions to see how the required texture size was reduced from 2048+ to 128.
Lei Wu is a Lead Tech Art Director overseeing core engine systems and rendering pipelines across art and programming teams, only for this majestic reality to vanish the moment he wakes up. By day, he is just a TA with an architectural background, drawn to cross-system pipelines and creative problems until he falls asleep and reads from the start.
Level Up Your Muscle Transfer
Liesbeth Levick | SideFX
Take your anatomical precision to the next level. This talk will show you how to move beyond the Muscle Transfer Recipe basics and gain full control over your character transfer. From fine-tuning bone placement and scaling muscle mass to managing fat distribution, you’ll learn the techniques needed to transfer between vastly different characters with ease. We’ll also cover expert strategies for solving distorted topology, turning technical challenges into seamless, production-ready results.
Liesbeth Levick is a Character Effects Technical Director at Side Effects Software, focusing on Muscles and Tissues. She studied Astrophysics and then moved on to work in grooming and CFX at animation and visual effects studios in South Africa and Canada. Her production experience includes creating tools and workflows for CFX in Houdini and helping transition studios to a Houdini-based CFX pipeline. Her familiarity with both artistic and technical roles drives her to build tools to make the lives of CFX artists easier.
Squirmbox: Approaching Games Like a Houdini Artist
Ben Elliot | Squirmbox
Learn how Houdini and the dream of a real-time procedural playground led Ben to create his first game, Squirmbox. Ben will discuss the lofty goals and painful truths of proceduralism and how he used Houdini to make art the easiest part of the development process. Topics discussed: KineFX, geometry processing, refusing to UV characters properly, pig heads, and more!
Ben Elliot is a Brooklyn-based Houdini artist turned game developer and the creator of Squirmbox, a live-performance sandbox game that blends modular synthesis and procedural animation to make expressive interactive visuals. Before games, he spent nine years in VFX specializing in creative simulation. Ben has taught Houdini and thesis development at the School of Visual Arts, guest lectured at Harvard on fabricating imagery, and recently presented Squirmbox at the Game Developers Conference.