Keynote and HIVE Talks
Join us online for an exclusive first look at Houdini 22 and the latest innovations across FX, procedural workflows, character animation, and more. These talks explore the latest features and updates in Houdini 22, presented by the artists, TDs, and developers behind the software.
Houdini 22 Keynote
Keynote
Sneak Peek
Houdini HIVE TALKS
Gain insights into new Houdini 22 workflows, production techniques, and innovations across modeling, environments, animation, FX, rigging, procedural content creation, and machine learning, while discovering the capabilities of Houdini’s newest release.
Fianna Wong | SideFX
Dmitrii Vlasenko | SideFX
Sasa Budimir | Freelance
Rob Pieke | SideFX
Alex Hamer | SideFX
Attila Torok | SideFX
Nikola Damjanov | Nordeus
Jakob RIngler | SideFX
Peter Sanitra | Nvidia
Max Rose | SideFX
Henry Dean | SideFX
Jakub Spacek | Freelance
H22 | Modeling & Solaris
Fianna Wong | SideFX
Fianna breaks down how she built a dense, detailed bike shop environment using Houdini 22's new tools entirely within SOPs. She covers a fast asset pipeline using image-to-3D generation, the updated Quad Mesh tool, Scatter Instances, and Implicit Surfaces for quick, cheap booleans. The real magic happens with the new Houdini 22 USD sub-nodes, which let you organize your USD hierarchy and manage layout transforms directly inside the familiar SOPs environment before cleanly passing everything over to LOPs.
H22 | Terrains in Copernicus
Dmitrii Vlasenko | SideFX
Dmitrii showcases the power of moving Houdini's high field tools over to Copernicus (COPs), utilizing GPU acceleration to process height fields as 2D volumes. He breaks down the incredibly helpful new "two-flag" workflow for simultaneous 3D height and texture previews, introduces a suite of new nodes like Strata and Clip, and walks through a revamped color ramp preset system. Finally, he demonstrates how to use "recipes" to save procedural setups as reusable node blueprints, sharing step-by-step builds for organic sand-rock and seamless, tiling cobblestone environments.
H22 | Motion Mixer
Sasa Budimer | Freelance
Freelance 3D artist Sasa breaks down a quick, playful puppet pipeline using Houdini 22's updated character animation tools. He walks through modeling a basic FK character rig, auto-extracting joint limits for ragdoll physics, and orchestrating layouts using the Motion Mixer. The real game-changer is the new nested clips feature, which makes it easy to layer additive secondary noise and offset timings without breaking your core animation keys. He wraps it all up by throwing the assets into Solaris for low-budget set lookdev and doing quick compositing inside Copernicus.
H22 | Solaris
Rob Pieke | SideFX
Rob breaks down the latest game-changing updates coming to Solaris and Karma in Houdini 22. He kicks off with how you can now build USD components, manage proxies, and lock down asset pivots right inside SOPs before ever jumping to Solaris. From there, he dives into incredible layout tools like the Paint Instances node and the Hydra-driven Scatter Instances LOP, complete with a brilliant deferred evaluation state that stops your viewport from lagging while moving heavy assets. Finally, Rob showcases massive rendering boosts in Karma, including equiangular multi-importance sampling for clean volumetric lighting, per-instance mesh light controls, live COP texturing viewports, and USD-native image filters that let you author compositing effects directly within your USD file.
H22 | Baking with Copernicus
Alex Hamer | SideFX
Alex Hamer from SideFX introduces Houdini 22's new Bake Pre-Process node in Copernicus, which takes the guesswork completely out of the pipeline. He demonstrates how this updated workflow features interactive viewport tools—including split UV seams to prevent skewing and clear intersection highlighting—letting you perfect your cage and ray-end offsets visually before driving shaders and exporting production-ready texture maps straight into engines like Unreal.
H22 | Pyro FX Recipes
Attila Torok | SideFX
Attila breaks down Houdini 22's updated, actively developed GPU Pyro solver in COPs, which moves way past the barebones framework from the previous release. He introduces the streamlined new Pyro block layout and demonstrates how to leverage an implicit surface workflow for fast, procedural sourcing and dynamic, animated collisions with accurate velocity tracking. Plus, he dives into powerful upgraded force settings like adaptive vortex confinement and velocity feedback loops, proving that you can execute heavy production effects like volcanic eruptions or sinking dry ice directly in a highly responsive GPU framework.
H22 | What's New in Copernicus
Nikola Damjanov | Nordeus
Nikola, a mobile games TD who helped develop Houdini 22's massive update of 123 new COP nodes, dives deep into a handful of game-changing texturing tools. He breaks down nine versatile new grunge maps—covering everything from rust and moisture to leaks and organic bark strips—before showing off the incredibly powerful Weave and Knit generators that output custom IDs and UVs for highly complex layered surfaces. Finally, he demonstrates the Mask Combine node, a workflow lifesaver that lets you bundle multiple baked maps into a single cable to cleanly blend and procedurally mask heroic assets like dragons and creature eggs with total artistic control.
H22 | Gaussian Splats and ML
Jakob Ringler | SideFX
Jakob Ringler dives into the cutting-edge Machine Learning additions shaking up Copernicus and Solaris in Houdini 22. He breaks down the massive performance upgrades coming to Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), showing how a new split architecture allows you to easily train, upscale, and procedurally deform tileable patterns right within COPs. The talk also highlights seamless mesh mapping using adjacency rasterization, intelligent alpha masking via Meta SAM 2, depth map extraction using Microsoft MOGI 2, and an extensive native toolkit to train, rasterize, and dynamically relight 3D Gaussian Splats inside Houdini.
H22 | Gaussian Splats
Peter Sanitra | Nvidia
Jakob Ringler dives into the cutting-edge Machine Learning additions shaking up Copernicus and Solaris in Houdini 22. He breaks down the massive performance upgrades coming to Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), showing how a new split architecture allows you to easily train, upscale, and procedurally deform tileable patterns right within COPs. The talk also highlights seamless mesh mapping using adjacency rasterization, intelligent alpha masking via Meta SAM 2, depth map extraction using Microsoft MOGI 2, and an extensive native toolkit to train, rasterize, and dynamically relight 3D Gaussian Splats inside Houdini.
H22 | KineFX Rigging & Animation
Max Rose | SideFX
Max walks through how he built a fully dynamic Jack in the Box inside Houdini 22. He shares a clever KineFX trick to crunch spiral joints into a straight center spline for clean spring compression before packing everything cleanly into Apex. By combining modified proxy ragdoll recipes, custom layer weights, and secondary spring motion, he demonstrates how to effortlessly layer procedural animation over physics simulations to maintain total artistic control without hand-keyframing every limb.
H22 | KineFX Procedural Animation
Henry Dean | SideFX
Henry Dean takes a deep dive into the fascinating, slightly unsettling world of rigging and animating a macro Gaussian Splat centipede entirely within Houdini 22's viewport. He candidly breaks down the unique headaches of working with a pure point cloud—like troubleshooting float-versus-vector scaling bugs and painting weights without surfaces to snap to—before sharing his process for kit-bashing a clean rest pose from a photographic scan. Finally, he demonstrates how he used Kin Effects capture proximity and Apex animation to generate a mesmerizing, procedural "metacronal wave" walking gait that handles dozens of skittering legs flawlessly.
H22 | Copernicus & Time Shift
Jakub Spacek | Freelance
Using a highly detailed, dense 3D statue scan to stress-test the pipeline, Jakub breaks down how to leverage the Geometry to Adjacency node to pack complex spatial data and seamlessly bridge boundaries inside Copernicus. He walks through an organic, custom solver setup utilizing position attribute sampling, noise distortion, native Turing patterns, ripple solvers, and new time manipulation nodes to drive a hyper-vibrant paint-spreading effect across separate UV islands with absolutely zero visual artifacts or bleeding.