Electronic Arts is looking to hire a Senior Technical Artist to work on development of procedural content creation pipelines for high quality game assets. This position will be part of a worldwide central technology team focused on developing tools and pipelines that can be leveraged across different EA studios.

Day to day you will...

• Gather user requirements, design, debug, test and maintain quality and reusable code
  
• Work with customers (i.e., artists, engineers) to create and support pipelines, tools and automation processes for getting content from its source, through curation, and up to asset management system
  
• Evaluate assets and determine the direction of development depending on the asset type
  
• Participate in code reviews, best practice documentation and other tech community projects
  

You are/have:

5-7 Years of relevant experience
Experience working with python
Experience in the VFX industry as an engineer or technical director, utilizing VFX production pipelines and common DCC apps (Maya, Houdini, etc)
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent training and professional experience
Knowledge of good software engineering practices (e.g., design patterns, object-oriented design)

Bonus if you have:

Experience working with rigging and lighting artists and software engineers within games or film.
Experience in web app development

Please follow this link for additional information and to apply:
https://ea.gr8people.com/jobs/177020/senior-technical-artist [ea.gr8people.com]

As a Pipeline Engineer on the team, you will focus on a large asset library product that has been developed. You will gather requirements, design tools, debug, build pipelines and tools, automate processes for curation and uploading assets, work on complex problems with artists and other engineers in the domain of tool, pipeline, and develop workflows to improve quality and improve processes. You will report to a team Development Director with support from the Technical Art Directors.

Day to day you will...

Gather user requirements, design, debug, test and maintain quality and reusable code
Work with customers (i.e., artists, engineers) to create and support pipelines, tools and automation processes for getting content from its source, through curation, and up to asset management system
Evaluate assets and determine the direction of development depending on the asset type
Participate in code reviews, best practice documentation and other tech community projects

You are/have:

Experience working with python
Experience in the VFX industry as an engineer or technical director, utilizing VFX production pipelines and common DCC apps (Maya, Motionbuilder, etc)
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent training and professional experience
Knowledge of good software engineering practices (e.g., design patterns, object-oriented design)

Bonus if you have:

Experience working with rigging and lighting artists and software engineers within games or film.
Experience in C#, C++ and working knowledge of .NET

Remote work option is available

If interested, please check out our posting here: https://ea.gr8people.com/jobs/173992/pipeline-engineer [ea.gr8people.com]

Went ahead and RFE'd these

81458, 81459

thank you!

actually figured it out I was loading the wrong node… doh!

thank you!

to add to this, I noticed that packed primitives behave the same way as the spheres, but primitive attributes are still passed as an array, which is not ideal

Howdy! I was trying to do some work today with attributes generated from the Houdini engine into maya. I know that attributes in Houdini will be expressed in the output shapes in Maya as extra attributes.

In my particular case, what I am trying to do is to pass attributes from a shape generated by the Houdini engine into another Houdini engine node, and noticed the following:

a- Plugging the array attributes that we store under extra attributes (I assume an array element per Houdini point/prim element) does not work so easily in Maya. As a result, does it make a sense to have an RFE to request that the Houdini engine import the extra attributes (only) of a shape node as detail attributes This will allow for some way to pass data in between mesh generated by the houdini engine, but also, allow for arbitrary passing of attributes from Maya meshes to the Houdini engine via the shape (without, say, having to add a ton of parameters so that we may have plugs)

b- I was very happy to realize that, if you pass primitive spheres with an attribute on them, these are represented as separate objects in Maya, with their primitive attributes expressed as regular float/int/string attributes! Would it be possible to have polysoups work the same way where each primitive generates a mesh and treat their primitive attributes as non-array when set on the maya shape?

I included an example HDA. Notice that when you pass the primitive spheres, they get split by primitive automatically, and their primitive attributes in Maya are treated as detail attributes. If you switch to the pig, notice that you have to split by group in order to get each primitive split, and their attributes come as array anyway

Hey Svenito, what did you set in your env file? I seem to be having the same issue right now where I cannot get the Houdini engine in Maya to load dso's (when opening via the debugger, I just get a merge node instead of the node)

I know this is on SESI's radar as the new polyExtrude is still missing several features that can only be done with the old Extrude SOP. I have a few RFEs in for this

McNistor
Funny how a user above felt the need to belittle the efforts of many new users to make Houdini past v.14 a bit more bearable for modelling allowing people to keep their hair while creating this type of work.

I have a feeling a user above may be me and I apologize if that came out the wrong way as it was not my intention. The efforts in making Houdini more and more accessible (especially with the excellent usability input from the XSI community) have opened up a lot of doors on what we can do with it at our studio. It has also enticed more people to try it out and find new approach of doing things which they may not have considered before!

I think on this post, I was referring to a more “extreme” issue I have experienced in our industry, outside of this particular community, where even mentioning another app can get people shaken up quite a bit.

Hope to see more threads like this for sure!

This thread was such a pleasure to read! I love that you actually took the time to leverage Houdini strengths in your modeling approach VS trying to just make Houdini just do what you may have liked from another application. Great work! There is definitely a lot of fun to be had in this application!

are you using windows remote desktop? This may be due to remote desktop forcing your video drivers to use the equivalent of unsupported cards, which makes houdini crash due to not being able to support anything less than GL3

Have you tried using tightVNC?

I think I may have RFE'd this one too. It would indeed be useful. Great work with this!

Pretty cool! Hope we can load MDL materials in Houdini one day? this with the recent substance plug in implementation, could be pretty awesome

https://www.allegorithmic.com/blog/substance-designer-55-here [allegorithmic.com]

Cool thing is SideFx are contributors to it, uncool thing is that Pixar only show it in Katana and Maya and Presto.

I did not realize that! would love to see USD support in Houdini! another better option than FBX!

https://vimeo.com/180966864 [vimeo.com]

Pretty nice..! USD is now open source too

the U and V are the parametric coordinates of that particular primitive (i.e. baricentric coords of a triangle, or the U and V location of a nurbs patch). A lot of other functions/VOPs actually return those coordinates (i.e. the xyzdist and intersect VOPs return the u and v at the intersection point). if you just want the normal of a polygon prim, keep those at 0, 0, and you will be fine

I use it quite a lot actually. Prim_normal returns the interpolated normal of a primitive at any given baricentric UV location on such primitive.

For example, if you wanted to blast all primitives facing away from a camera (given a cameraViewVector variable that you created previously) , you can do this:

.
.
.
vector primN = prim_normal(0, @primnum, 0, 0);

if (dot(primN, cameraViewVector) > 0)
{
removeprim(0, @primnum, 1);
}

this is akin to the primuv function, but to get primitive normals more directly without having to have an N attribute

oh wow, this post was from a while back! since then, there has been a ton of improvements in Houdini for this particular area (such as VDBs, the new Triangulate 2D, etc). Depending on what you are trying to do, one technique may work better than another. What does your point cloud look like?

I agree with that. I think in that definition, arrangement of elements implies that there was some “intention” on taking elements (from wherever they come) and arranging them in a certain fashion (meaning not necessarily how they are arrange by nature. Nature phenomena does not indeed count as art)

Indeed, the default output of an algorithm is not art on itself, but using an algorithm as a means to arrange elements could be (i.e the golden ratio is not art, but paintings using the golden ratio to give a particular feeling is)

I have two small requests: please make the new smoothing tool available as a node (or update the existing one) and add check boxes in the Edit node for the “Make circle”, “Evenly space selection” and “Straighten selection” commands.

yes please!! make sure all those awesome edit features are available for procedural workflows too! I would take them as python commands too if it is too much work to put them in a SOP. Adding the edge loop commands to python helped a lot!