11:00 AM EST
Polyline Creation    

This talk will discuss the Polyline Creation Tool made for the SideFX Labs Tech Art Challenge. The focus will be on Python states to allow user interaction inside the Houdini viewport and solving problems associated with that. There will also be some general tips and tricks when working with viewer states.

Peter Prickarz is a 4th year Houdini Tech Art student from Breda University of Applied Sciences, where he created HDAs for games in Unreal Engine and Unity. He enjoys solving technical issues and making workflows more efficient for artists. He has a fascination for combining proceduralism with art-directability. Currently he’s doing an internship as a Tech Artist at Hangar 13 in Czechia.

11:15 AM EST
HEXAGONA:
Generating Hexagon Tiled Boards Procedurally     

In this presentation, Christos will walk you through the different elements that made HEXAGONA come to life. An overview of the asset’s features, what inspired him, and the challenges he faced in the process. He promised us he won’t include math.

Christos Stavridis  grew up wanting to be an astronaut - out of curiosity for exploring the unknown and his deep love for the cosmos that surrounds us. At some point arts and music came into his life and he realized he didn't have to be an astronaut to satisfy his hunger for knowledge. The spark of expression became a flame and so began the era of creativity and exploration, an adventure of learning, creating and joy.

11:30 AM EST
Removing Repetition: Linked Subnets     

This talk will highlight the Linked Subnet tool, its development, and how it can be used to automate the creation and more importantly the updating of many variations while also keeping their individual changes. 

Kilian Baur is a VFX artist at RISE Visual Effects Studios in Stuttgart. He started as a 3D Generalist but quickly learned to enjoy the flexibility and technical problem solving of working with Houdini. Now he is mainly focusing on FX but also enjoys creating (mostly) useful scripts and tools.

11:45 AM EST
EHA Poly Slice    

Last year I submitted the first version of the EHA Poly Slice to the Tech Art Challenge contest on the sidefx.com forums. And to my amazement, it ended up winning Third place. :) Since then, I've improved the asset, stabilizing it further and added new features to improve its performance, now released as version 1.3 publicly. 

DOWNLOAD POLYSLICE TOOL

Erwin Heyms is a Houdini Technical artist at Ubisoft Montpellier in France. He has been responsible for the procedural toolsets on various AAA games such as Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint. Next to this he is also a Houdini Teacher and mentor and has developed several courses over the course of his career. His largest masterclass on "Procedural Asset Production" currently under development.

12:00 PM EST
Micro Process Placement System     

This talk introduces a scalable, modular, micro-placement system using PDG parallel processing.

Jiale Zhang  is Self-taught and now has many years of Houdini experience. He worked as a FX artist in MPC Montreal and now works as a technical artist in a game company in China.