The key to me is portability to game engines, that alone justifies using Substance Designer and Painter as the transfer is pretty much direct and scalable between various delivery platforms.

I would love better support for Substance but at the same time I must confess we will need to train more artists using it as right now is only on the hands of a handful.

Finally it's out!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfaSxIkLslE [www.youtube.com]

https://www.framestore.com/news/paddington-ms [www.framestore.com]

A long journey, lots of artists involved and excruciating detail to be honest with such an amazing character. A lot of Houdini for all the VFX as you can imagine.

I hope you like it!

Is this still the case?

Thanks guys for the help… and just to keep everyone posted on the issue and how it was done…

Thank you so much, I must confess I expect the API to do the hard work for me in terms of analysing if there is animation on a node, ultimately I am sure many tools will do this kind of evaluation so seems pretty standard method to build. Anyway, I will crack on.

The tip to discover the methods I didn't know so thanks… good call.

regarding the node type, I did indeed find it but seemed to return something I was not expecting.. I am confused as in other packages you have some TAG/NUMBER returned that signals the type of object. I particularly like the Softimage way where you filter your selection but I guess it is just muscle memory.

thanks a lot.

This is totally awesome and surely a great addition to our toolset… Noise has been very annoying at times..

thanks Andy.

I am struggling a bit with the documentation to find the right methods and information regarding;

- Find if a node is animated (SRT) or not… I would expect to have a node.isAnimated() method but don't seem to find it.

- Also, I want to know if the node I have selected is a camera and can't seem to be able to filter the selection…. am I missing something?

thanks.

WRITE DIRECTLY TO emma.leroy@framestore.com PLEASE

We are looking for Senior Houdini Lighting TDs to start on the 3rd of July… amazing projects going on right now!!

Just a quick reminder, Framestore is trying to fill a lot of positions in advertising (also in film), check this for advertising..

https://chk.tbe.taleo.net/chk01/ats/careers/searchResults.jsp?org=FRAMESTORE&cws=39 [chk.tbe.taleo.net]

Thanks Rob, almost there with the website itself… quite a lot of work I must confess…

RobW
Hi Jordi,

That sounds awesome!
And a website makes the most sense regarding updates. :-)


rob

Houdini Guides (v2) Countdown

I have been teasing you guys quite a bit so I think it is time to start the Beta process on the new project, this is the story.

After the success of the series of guides to help transition Softimage artists to Houdini, and given the SideFX fast speed of development, it was clear these guides needed an update. But of course, a PDF update was a bit too simple. So after months trying to find the best way (from PDFs with rich media to Apps with media content), I settled for a website approach which would open many interesting avenues for content creation and distribution.

So I have been working hard at it for the last year and invested the last 5 months on the actual construction of the platform which will allow us (this is no longer just me on my own) to update the content to help artists get up to speed with the Houdini's toolset and challenges ahead.

The goal is to fully update the transition guides create an even richer and more in-depth set of guides to help artists use Houdini.

All the content will be updated to the very latest version of Houdini and as soon as changes occur we will update them again. Also translated to Spanish (more coming in the future).

We are inviting artists interested in sharing their knowledge, approaches as well as their translation skills in exchange for full access. At the same time than I am exploring other avenues regarding money compensation but this will need some polls.

Over time we will add interviews, premium content, workshops, a download/shop area of curated tools and much more, so this is just the first phase.

Today I am calling for all of you interested in being involved in the Beta process in order to test the architecture, workflow, servers, plugins, security, content templates and more so please make sure you get in touch only if you can put a bit of time onto it.

The profile of people I am trying to find are;
- Houdini experienced artists.
- Softimage & Maya artists using Houdini.
- Softimage & Maya artists that have not used yet.
- Native Spanish speaking artists happy to help me translate it all.
- Wordpress + HTML + CSS + PHP experienced programmer.

If you are interested please send me an email to

beta@houdiniguides.com

I will be giving access little by little as I analyse the progress of the server which I imagine I will have to upgrade so please be patient.

The DOP context is different (quite a bit actually), it describes behaviours and relationships so the order may or may not be important depending on the operator.

Furthermore, think of it as initial state and then a loop (that may run many time between frames) and how data out becomes the data in on the next loop.

I will suggest you “debug” what is going on by putting Wrangle nodes that count up an index so you can follow up how the tree is being evaluated.

A better analogy than the operator stack in Softimage would be Softimage simulation environment (in the explorer) because truly, before ICE, there was not such thing as a simulation stack right? (if my brain is still working I think this was the case)

I have exported the whole thing as one single PDF, feel free to download and redistribute. I will be keeping it there for a while but don't assume it will be there forever.

https://mega.nz/# [mega.nz]!BEVkXCgZ!5KOvkuR7mAX0uWquuVnH7_Jn3Ku1marx9msut42Sgl4

I hope it helps.

At the moment they are hosting them due to the fact it was crippling my Dropbox account (I was forced to go to Professional mode due to the traffic!!!)

If you are in a hurry I can put them on MEGA and you can download them from there.
jb

Thanks Michael for the info.

Really looking forward for the next iteration of the rigging system.

I have an object with a Follow path constraint and all works lovely but when I press V to open the animation editor the position parameter living inside the chops does not appear.

To fix it I go to Scope channels Dialog and turn on the “Include Descendants” and things work but…

next time I open the window (even with the flag on) these channels dont appear any more and I have to go through the same route.

Is this a bug? a feature? It would be great to have a hotkey modifier (shift+V may be?) to bring the curves and its descendants as with the new CHOPs approach this may become very important workflow tweak.

I do hope this makes sense… thanks

Can you clarify what you mean by “dynamically building a rig”? I keep looking for it but I can't find it in the clip.

Also, I can't find the “changing the pivot space for certain rigs to cleanup animation keys”


This is what I saw, a semi-automated rig (moving the head moves the torso a bit to save time animating) and at the end of the clip I saw he building constraints to offset animation and overlap animation.

Is this what you meant?

We use MD for the cloth design and look dev but the simulation is handled with low resolution versions inside other packages (houdini next).
Mostly due to workflow

Not like AFX and traversing the whole scene is certainly not trivial so as stated, your friend is the Pre-Flight and work in a way that makes things easy to port from the start.

This should be a good tool to put together… mmm… will have to think about it.