Saturday | May 10 | 10:00 AM CEST

Design Visualization | HDAs, VAT & Python  

Explore how you can use Houdini Digital Assets and Python to assist the creative flow between Houdini, Unreal & DaVinci Resolve. We will also take a look at how you can generate and preview Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) in Houdini.

 

Johan Borgström is a freelance 3D artist. With a background in industrial design, he is primarily focused on design visualization in the automotive industry. To assist the artistic process he has a strong focus on pipeline tooling which usually involves creating HDAs in Houdini or writing Python for data exchange between DCCs.              

Saturday | May 10 | 10:50 AM CEST

The Art of Decomposition: Tackling Complexity with Houdini  

Learning Houdini is a wild ride of trial and error—breaking things, making mistakes, and slowly unlocking its endless possibilities. Through my journey with Houdini, I discovered how experimenting and deconstructing complex problems sparks creativity and reveals surprising connections to the natural world. Beyond FX, I’ll be making a case for Houdini as an educational tool—showing how its ability to visualize math and science can help students explore and understand the world in a whole new way.

 

Benjamin Sugar is a Hungarian-born visual artist and motion designer, primarily working in the field of visual effects for feature film and advertisement. His artistic practice is centered around the creative use of technology, which includes 3D design, proceduralism and audio-visual composition. Since settling in Berlin in 2015 he began to pursue a career in visual effects as an FX artist with a focus on natural phenomena, such as fluids, fire and soft-body simulations. He has worked for a number of leading german VFX studios, contributing to high-profile feature films and episodics and is currently the Senior FX artist for bEpic Studio in Berlin.              

Saturday | May 10 | 11:40 AM CEST

OFFF Titles - Reimagined  

Walk through the process of making OFFF titles. Not the official OFFF titles, but rather, the titles if OFFF had asked me to make them. Explore the Houdini process of the different shots and the creative process behind it.

 

Paul Esteves is a freelance 3d artist. He loves soft bodies, rigid bodies, all the bodies really. He loves simulations and trying to make things beautiful and elegant as they crash and squish against each other.              

Saturday | May 10 | 12:30 PM CEST

XK Studio: COPing Mechanisms and Experimental Detours  

An inside look at their latest projects, the creative and technical fascinations driving them, with a focus on COPs, Gaussian Splatting and the experimental methods shaping their work.

 

Alexa Sirbu is the Creative Director and co-founder of XK Studio. Through procedural and sculptural techniques, she explores how current technologies can facilitate storytelling in a digital realm. 

Stephan Helbing is a London based 3D artist and designer at XK studio with a deep curiosity for 3D scanning and simulation driven design in Houdini.              

Saturday | May 10 | 2:00 PM CEST

Manifold Realities  

Manifold Realities explores the intersection of proceduralism, creativity, and emergence in digital design. Through the lens of my project Manifold, this talk examines how procedural workflows generate not just singular outcomes, but entire ecosystems of possibilities. By embracing controlled unpredictability, we can push beyond traditional pipelines and discover new ways of shaping digital art and motion.

 

Simon Holmedal is a director and partner at Panoply. He creates systems-driven design and has worked with brands like Apple, Marvel, and Amazon. His work isn’t about chasing possibilities—it’s about making the right ones real.              

Saturday | May 10 | 3:05 PM CEST

The Phizz-whizzing Effects of ETC  

A journey through the various FX created by ETC for Sainsbury's Christmas campaign featuring Roald Dahl's beloved BFG. Dan walks us through the challenges of achieving a stop motion aesthetic for director Sam Brown as well as how ETC created and managed numerous environmental FX including a system for creating predictable and directable magic trails. Additionally he will showcase all the of the FX work he has produced over the course of a year at ETC as well as discuss some of the other tools he created to help him.

 

Dan Yargici has been working in visual effects since 1997 and has been using Houdini for the last 10 years. Having spent the first five years of his career working in the world of stings, idents and documentary graphics for television, he made the move to commercials where he has worked for companies including Glassworks, The Mill and currently ETC where he has been for almost 4 years.               

Saturday | May 10 | 4:10 PM CEST

Copy and Transform  

Our presentation is for anyone curious about Houdini, whether you're an experienced user or just starting out. Using "Copy and Transform" as a metaphor, we’ll explore how taking inspiration from others can lead to something uniquely your own. The focus isn’t solely on deep technical details but on how Houdini can be a powerful tool to express and artdirect your ideas. This talk is about encouraging you to experiment, stay creative, and make the software work for your vision without getting lost in the technical side of things.

 

Andreas Barden/Lukas Muller work at Bureau Klaus Alman (BKA) a 3D animation and VFX studio led by a team of skilled artists who bring nearly 20 years of experience to the table. We are always keen to combine convincing simulations with an emphasis on beautifully crafted lighting and rendering. BKA is a tight-knit team of five artists and a producer. This lean setup allows us to take full creative direction on projects while seamlessly collaborating with other studios for additional support. Whether it’s directing, managing technical simulations, or helping out on ongoing projects, BKA is fully equipped to elevate any project.               

Saturday | May 10 | 5:00 PM CEST

Cheap, Cheerful, (not quite) Camera‑Ready: 

Leveraging generative AI for 3D content generation  

This talk demonstrates how cutting‑edge generative‑AI tools — Trellis, Hunyuan, and curated Hugging Face/Civitai models — can be leveraged inside Houdini’s procedural system to yield prompt‑driven meshes. We cover how generative AI amplifies procedural workflows, unlocking rapid iteration, flexible & controllable stylistic exploration, and on‑the‑fly design variations unattainable through traditional methods. Attendees leave with a principled methodology for deploying scalable, exploratory 3‑D pipelines in design driven production environments.

 

Moritz Schwind is gonna take part in it all - Be it pixels, hardware, code or cameras. And sometimes even reassemble it. In his spare time, he likes to dabble with code and create generative artwork. He claims his early exposure to QBasic is no help at all when working in Houdini, Blender, Processing or Arduino. But it might have been what started his fascination for the boundaries of code and art. When not wreaking havoc to any intriguing devices around him, he works as a freelance Technical and Art Director. His more recent areas of interest cover the use of scientific algorithms in generative design and the application of AI in creative fields.