Thursday | October 23 | 9:30 AM JST

Vertex Animation Textures を用いたゲーム向け破壊表現

HoudiniとUnreal Engineによるリアルタイム破壊表現 このワークショップでは、Houdiniの機能を駆使して、Unreal Engine 5で使用可能な精緻な建物破壊表現を制作します。レイヤー化されたフラクチャから破片、瓦礫と煙シミュレーションまで、ディティールとパフォーマンスを高める破壊エフェクトを実際に体験できます。 対象者: ゲームやリアルタイムグラフィックスに関心のあるテクニカルアーティストやFXアーティストに特に有益です。本ワークショップは、Houdiniの基本的なツール(SOPs、ROPs、Game Labsツール) やUnreal Engine 5 (シーンレイアウト、マテリアル) に関する基礎知識があることを前提としています。

Michael Rutkowski Michael Rutkowski transitioned from the film industry to games in 2016 and has since accumulated nine years of experience as a Technical Artist and Graphics Programmer, focusing on rendering and procedural generation. In 2018 he joined Square Enix Japan, and presented on Nintendo Switch optimization for Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age S at Unreal Fest East 2019. In 2022 he created Meta Meow Co., Ltd., a game outsourcing company specializing in Technical Art and Graphics Programming, and he currently leads tool development and research at Meta Meow. Michal gave talks on Houdini at CEDEC 2024 and SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, and in May 2025 he ran a workshop on RBD (rigid-body dynamics) simulation at the Houdini Ignite Workshop in Seoul, South Korea.

2016年に映像業界からゲーム業界へ転身し、描画やプロシージャル生成を中心にテクニカルアーティストとして約8年の経験を積む。2018年に株式会社スクウェア・エニックスへ入社し、Unreal Fest East 2019にて『ドラゴンクエストXI 過ぎ去りし時を求めて』の最適化について登壇。2022年には、テクニカルアートおよび描画プログラミングに特化した受託開発会社「株式会社Meta Meow」を設立。2024年にはCEDECおよびSIGGRAPH AsiaでHoudiniに関する講演を行い、2025年5月には韓国のHoudini Ignite Workshop SeoulにてRBDシミュレーションのワークショップを開催  

Thursday | October 23 | 10:10 AM JST

What's New in Solaris with Houdini 21

Join us for an overview of the exciting improvements to Solaris in Houdini 21. We'll look at workflow improvements in LOPs, new shaders and look development updates, as well as better performance in Karma and KarmaXPU.
Houdini 21 の Solaris の素晴らしい改善点の概要をご覧ください。LOP のワークフローの改善、新しいシェーダとルック デベロップメントのアップデート、Karma と KarmaXPU のパフォーマンス向上などを紹介します。

Chris Rydalch has worked in feature animation for the last 10 years. Most of that time has been spent in production as a character simulation, crowds, and FX TD at Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky Studios. His most recent role at Blue Sky was Production Technology TD, where he helped roll out a new pipeline based around USD. Today he works at SideFX in the R&D group, primarily focused on workflows and tools for Solaris and Karma.

Thursday | October 23 | 11:00 AM JST

Big Flex: Controlling Muscle Shapes with Otis

Learn how to use the muscle target shape workflow with Otis where you can now have multiple target shapes per muscle! Explore how to use new H21 nodes to create the target shapes procedurally. See how this all ties in with the new muscle activation workflow, which can be utilized to create a separate activation attribute per set of target shapes.
Otisを使った筋肉ターゲットシェイプワークフローの使い方を学びます。筋肉ごとにターゲットシェイプを複数作成できるようになりました。新しい H21 ノードを使って、プロシージャルにターゲットシェイプを作成し、新しい筋肉アクティベーションワークフローと連携させるかについて学びます。このワークフローでは、ターゲットシェイプのセット単位で個別のアクティベーションアトリビュートを設定可能になりました。

Liesbeth Levick is a Character Effects Technical Director at Side Effects Software, focusing on Muscles and Tissues. She studied Astrophysics and then pivoted 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.

Thursday | October 23 | 1:15 PM JST

Wet Bear | Rendering Wet Animals with Karma XPU

Making CG animals was one of favorite tasks at Crater studio. Last year our team went on small road trip, where we shot short film in beautiful river Rzav in Western Serbia. Idea was to stress test our pipeline, from animation, simulations of muscles, fur and water all the way to look dev and light. To our amazement Karma XPU cut render times 10x, while multi shot workflow allowed us to iterate much faster than before.
CG動物の制作は、Craterスタジオで最も好きな仕事の一つでした。昨年、私たちのチームはちょっとしたロードトリップに出かけ、セルビア西部の美しいルザフ川で短編映画の撮影を行いました。アニメーション、筋肉、毛皮、水のシミュレーションからルックデブ、ライティングに至るまで、パイプラインのストレステストを行うというアイデアでした。驚いたことに、Karma XPUによってレンダリング時間が10分の1に短縮され、マルチショットワークフローによってイテレーションも以前よりはるかに高速化されました。

Petar Jovovic has spent the past fifteen years leading the Crater studio team up the steep hill of success in VFX industry. From most advanced set extensions and crazy camera work, across dozens of CG characters to crazy FX heavy shots he was pushing boundaries and ambitions of studio. He is also founder of Crater VFX training center, CGA festival and a VES member.

Thursday | October 23 | 2:40 PM JST

Adaptive Fracture Synthesis and Propagation in VEX using OpenSubdiv Limit Surface Derivatives

This presentation demonstrates a VEX-driven setup for procedural surface cracking on animated geometry. Crack propagation is guided by curves, geodesic distances, and attribute gradients. OpenSubdiv limit surface derivatives provide high-order sampling of positions, normals, and curvature, and adaptive subdivision refines geometry around fracture paths.

Yunus Balciogluis a Senior FX Technical Director with experience at studios such as Industrial Light & Magic and MPC. His feature film credits include The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Marvel's Eternals, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Aquaman, Alien: Covenant, Pirates of the Caribbean 5, and many more. Before feature films, I worked in Silicon Valley, building an interactive lidar, radar, and camera analysis/visualization tool for Lyft's Level 5 Autonomous Vehicle Division in Palo Alto. Earlier in my career, I was a Technical Artist at EA in the game industry.

Thursday | October 23 | 4:30 PM JST

Dawning 2 - Using New Terrain/COPS Tools

In this presentation we'll show how to do large scale martian landscapes. We'll see the power of new erosion solver, new COPS and TOPS for massive parallelization of terrain generation. optimization techniques. Also, we'll dive into cost and benefits of using ML for terrain work.
このプレゼンテーションでは、大規模な火星の地形を作成する方法を紹介します。新しい侵食ソルバー、新しいCOPSとTOPSによる地形生成の大規模並列化、そして最適化手法の威力をご覧ください。また、地形作成に機械学習を使用する際のコストとメリットについても詳しく説明します。

Bogdan Amidzic has been in VFX industry from 2006, working both in 2d and 3d departments, mainly in Crater studio. His art background experience and programming skills lead to finally diving into Houdini ecosystem. Over several projects he has been responsible first for adopting Houdini as a main tool, then adopting USD/Solaris pipeline. Recently he started teaching as Houdini instructor in Crater VFX training center, and has organized several Houdini user group events.

Thursday | October 23 | 5:45 PM JST

Building the World of Kemuri with Houdini

Part 1: How Unseen leverages Houdini Engine in Unreal to build the world of Kemuri and allows artists to create complex art and design directed worlds. From Building generation, set dressing, terrain and more.

Part 2: Procedural placement of assets, via Houdini and Unreal Engine. Kemuri has some unique challenges in which Houdini plays a critical role in allowing us to process, generate and export data for use in gameplay, visuals and world building.

Kieran Belkus is a Senior Procedural Technical Artist at Unseen focused on aiding with the complex task of world building, developing tools and pipelines to support bringing the vision of Kemuri to life. Previous to Unseen, he worked on Procedural City generation at Woven by Toyota, as an Artist/Technical Artist at various studios in the UK before moving to Japan. With a love of world building, he moved into Procedural Generation as a way to blend art and science to build directable, scalable worlds in real-time.

Thursday | October 23 | 6:20 PM JST

Simulating Forests with Natsura

In this presentation, we will talk about how the procedural foliage toolset Natsura has been used to create foliage assets. We will dive into a variety of generation techniques and the use of Nanite for foliage. We will also show a project where Natsura was used to simulate a large forest, to later generate synthetic data.

Feike Postmes is a Technical Artist based in Japan. His career began in the gaming and automotive industries, having worked for Square Enix Japan and Applied Intuition. He co-founded and is currently working on Natsura, a procedural foliage toolset. He also co-leads DodoDevs, a Technical Art Consultancy company in Japan.