SYDNEY AUSTRALIA HIVE
Image from Mortal Kombat 2 | Rising Sun Pictures
University of Technology Sydney | August 22, 2026
UTS Building 6 | 702 Harris Street | Ultimo | NSW 2007
Welcome to the very first Houdini HIVE + Ignite Workshop Day at UTS! Please join us for an exciting in-person gathering where creativity meets technology. Dive into the world of visual effects, animation, and more with industry professionals and experts.
Select from one of our 4 hands-on IGNITE Workshops in the morning , then stay for our inspiring lineup of HIVE Talks in the afternoon as well as our expert discussion panel.
SPONSORED BY:
Houdini IGNITE WORKSHOPS
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Houdini IGNITE workshops are instructor-led, classroom-based training sessions. Dive into Houdini under the guidance of an expert! They're also a great way to meet and spend time with other Houdini artists.
WORKSHOP 1
Blue Mountains Landscapes
In this session, you will learn how to set up a USD workflow, with Solaris and RenderMan from research to render. Building a Blue Mountains landscape from DEM data, working with Copernicus and Terrain tools, for adding detail and textures.
Scattering trees, rocks and biome relevant assets.
Finishing off with volumetric clouds and the signature blue haze which gives the area its name.
WORKSHOP LEVEL:
Intermediate | You are familar with basic Houdini concepts
Mark Flanagan is now based in Melbourne as the Program Manager Screen Media and Digital Technology CoVE / RMIT. He leads a team of 40 educators and 600 students in animation, VFX, and games courses.
WORKSHOP 2
Motion Graphics in LOPS
This hands on workshop guides participants through the process of building and rendering a short product-focused motion graphics sequence. Working from the ground up; starting with modelling the asset in SOPs, before blocking and assembling the sequence in Solaris and finally lighting and rendering with Karma XPU.
WORKSHOP LEVEL
Intermediate | You are familar with basic Houdini concepts
Matthew Tillman is an Independent motion designer and technical generalist; with over 15 years of experience across advertising, TV, film, live events and immersive experiences.
WORKSHOP 3
Learn to Animate with KineFX
Ever wanted to animate in Houdini?
Here’s your chance. Join us for a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn the fundamentals of animation by bringing the classic bouncing ball to life — and take it a step further by animating the cutest kiwi character.
WORKSHOP LEVEL:
Beginner | Little to no experience with Houdini
Garrick Rawlingson is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Floating Rock and an animation veteran with credits on major Hollywood movies. Passionate about the future of animation, he has consistently pushed the frontier of technology, innovation, and storytelling—bridging creativity and business to build bold new opportunities in the industry.
WORKSHOP 4
The Key to SOPs: Attributes
To wield Houdini's true power and potential, you need to master attributes — and that's exactly what you'll be doing here. In this beginner-friendly workshop, you'll unleash attributes to drive parameters and scatter and distribute geometry. You'll gain a solid understanding of how attributes work, and come away with production-proven tools and techniques for bending them to your will.
WORKSHOP LEVEL:
Beginner | Little to no experience with Houdini
Fraser Shiers is a Senior Generalist at ILM Sydney and the Founder and instructor at Hipflask. His VFX credits include Wicked and Stranger Things Season 5, and his commercial work has been recognised with a number of prestigious international awards, including wins at the World Illustration Awards and Creativity International Awards. When he's not knee-deep in production work, he's untangling Houdini's trickiest concepts for beginners at Hipflask — a platform that's helped thousands of artists find their feet in Houdini.
Houdini HIVE TALKS
Houdini HIVE presentations are educational, lecture-style talks covering a wide range of Houdini topics. Although these days are always better in person, we do post most recordings on our video channels afterwards.
1:35 PM
Matthew Tilman | Pixel Ninja
3:00 PM
James Hardy & Anna Molamphy | Netflix Animation Studios
3:50 PM
Ben Andersen | Cosmic Dino Studio
Upside Down: The FX of Stranger Things Season 5
Brent Droog | 1:00 PM
Breaking down the technical and creative process of how ILM's FX team brought the Upside Down to life on Stranger Things Season 5.
Brent Droog is an FX Supervisor for ILM and has been a CG generalist for the last 18 years. He started his career in LA working on the first Avengers but has since travelled around the world, working on Jungle Book in London, Robo 2.0 in Mumbai, and most recently Transformers One and Stranger Things in Sydney, Australia. He is in the industry for his love of cartoons.
Large Format Production | Getting pixels onto Big Weird Screens
Matthew Tillman | 1:35 PM
Approaches to rendering for large displays with larger resolutions. How independent artists and small studios can learn to squeeze the most pixels out of the hardware they have. Helpful tips learned over years of working on projections and events.
Matthew Tillman is an Independent motion designer and technical generalist; with over 15 years of experience across advertising, TV, film, live events and immersive experiences.
Oh Behave, Agents! Harness Engineering for VFX production
Andrew Graham | 2:10 PM
What does it take to get agents to behave in VFX? Multiphase harnesses, context engineering, test writers, linters, grilling, static typing: I’ll take you through a journey for what it takes to produce a harness good enough to satisfy engineers in code review. Let’s get agents that can navigate Houdini like an adept TD!
Andrew Graham is a Lead Software Engineer at Eyeline Studios (Netflix) with 27 years in computer graphics. He spent three years as Houdini R&D Supervisor at Scanline VFX, and before that worked as a Senior FX TD at ILM, Weta Digital, Sony and others, on films including Doctor Strange, Star Wars: Rogue One and The Hunger Games. He now builds Forge, an agentic code-generation harness in use by multiple developers at the studio.
Procedural Modelling Pipelines at Netflix Animation Studio
James Hardy & Anna Molamphy | 3:00 PM
Netflix Animation Studios continues to be on the cutting edge of tools and technology within Houdini. The procedural modelling pipelines that have been created blends artistic creativity with smooth processes to promote efficiency. Anna will present the artistic workflows that have been made for the different modelling toolsets, while James will demonstrate how the pipeline technology has been made to cater for the artistic workflows.
James Hardy is a Procedural Assets & FX TD at Netflix Animation Studios in Sydney. With a passion for getting the best out of people, he advocates for creating solutions to ensure creativity can thrive while also being efficient under pressure. When not creating, he finds himself asking questions on how things can be better and ponders what he can do to get there.
Anna Molamphy is the Technical Lead for the Modelling department at Netflix Animation Studios. She specializes in designing Houdini-based asset creation workflows and developing custom in-house tools for major NAS productions.
Inside the Black Box: Licensing, Distribution, and a Hair Deformer
Ben Andersen | 3:50 PM
A brief look at a hair deformation tool, the problem it solves and what sets it apart, then a dive into black-boxing, licensing, and the development tooling that makes iteration and distribution easy.
Ben Andersen has spent over twenty years in visual effects and animation, first as an FX artist at Pixar, DreamWorks, and Iloura, before transitioning to pipeline at Luma and Eyeline. He found that he loved building the tools that help other artists do their best work even more than doing the work itself. These days he leads a pipeline development team, with a specific love for Houdini tooling and USD-based workflows.
Basic Uses of Linear Algebra in VFX
Jordan Walsh | 4:40 PM
In this talk, I will introduce and demystify some topics of Linear Algebra and show their use in 3D visual effects. I will cover the use of Dot Products and how to manipulate vectors as well as breaking down what a Matrix is and how we can use it to easily create waves and volumetric hurricanes.
Jordan Walsh started his VFX career over 25 years ago creating cinematic cutscenes for games. He is currently a CG Supervisor at Framestore Melbourne, working on blockbuster films such as Disney's Moana (Live Action), The Sheep Detectives, and Marvel's Thunderbolts*. Originally from Melbourne, Jordan took a 10-year "visit" to London to work at DNEG, where he was Head of the FX department as well as an FX Supervisor on numerous Hollywood features. He has a great love for Houdini's procedural and in depth workflows.
Art-Driven Automation: HDA Design Philosophy on Stranger Things
Patrick Jeffs | 5:15 PM
Discover the core HDA design philosophy behind Stranger Things: Tales From '85, focusing on how complex Houdini networks were converted into intuitive, artist-first tools. This session breaks down the specific assets built for the season, the methodology behind them, and practical production tips for balancing procedural power with creative control.
Patrick Jeffs is a Senior Effects Artist at Flying Bark Productions with over 5 years’ experience in the animation industry. His credits include season 3 of Marvel’s What If…? and ABC original series 100% Wolf: Book of Hath. Most recently, Patrick worked as the 3D FX Lead on Netflix’s premium animated series Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85.
Fatality By Design in Mortal Kombat 2
Isaac Turier | 6:05 PM
An artistic and technical breakdown of how selected fatalities were created for Mortal Kombat 2 using Houdini. The presentation begins with a high-level overview of some of the FX developed by Rising Sun Pictures for the film. Then explores the specific workflows used to develop and design individual fatalities, culminating in a detailed, step-by-step walkthrough of a melting arm effect.
Isaac Turier is a Lead FX Technical Director (FXTD) at Rising Sun Pictures, where he has spent the past six years creating visual effects for feature film and television, including Andor, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and One Piece season 2.