Houdini at SIGGRAPH 2016

Blue Sky Studios | A Look at the FX in Ice Age: Collision Course
Dave will discuss the various FX work done in Ice Age: Collision Course. Using Houdini, the Blue Sky FX team created asteroids, meteors, volcanoes, camp fires, fireworks, electricity, large scale smoke effects and many more. In addition, he will also describe the Houdini rigs and techniques created for the film.

Digital Domain | Digital Water Workflow at DD3.0
During our talk we will breakdown the current commercial/feature workflows for digital water. We will cover Houdini Engine tools for animation/layout of oceans within Maya and our shelf tools for setting up all of our water sims, clustered secondary sims, and render layers.  As well as rendering all the elements out of Mantra.

Google | Leveling the playing field with Google Cloud Platform ZYNC Render
Todd Prives, Google Product Manager for Rendering, will show cloud rendering for Houdini on the ZYNC platform. ZYNC allows studios of all sizes to tap the computational power of Google’s infrastructure, directly from the creative tools artists already know and use.

GridMarkets | Creating Detailed Ink in Water Simulations
Phill, currently working as an FX Arist at The Mill, will be presenting an efficient workflow for creating highly detailed ink in water simulations. The tutorial will demonstrate quick ways to prototype the effect and utilize GridMarkets for an optimized simulation and render pipeline. Learn ways to manage heavy simulation data and stylize the effect during compositing, all within Houdini.

GridMarkets | How Deeps, Dependencies and Automated Movie Generation Can Help Speed Your Workflow
Jeff Ranasinghe, VFX Supervisor, will present a tutorial on using deep images with GridMarkets and how they can speed up your workflow. Jeff will also cover the use of ROP dependencies to automate tasks so that multiple steps such simulation, rendering and be run on one submission. And finally we will introduce our movie generation ROP for creating h624 or ProRes movie files based on Houdini's output.

GridMarkets & GeoSim | Creating Real 3D Cities for Film, TV and GameDev using Houdini
GeoSim Systems has created Virtual Vancouver, the world’s first high-precision 3D model of a real city with 1cm visual resolution at street level. When a major client asked for a series of 4xHD stereoscopic fly-through shots, Houdini was the obvious choice for rendering. The job had to be completed in less than two weeks and could not have been accomplished without the distributed render power of GridMarkets.com, a partner of both SideFX and now GeoSim. The presentation will show how entire cities can now be captured, modeled and rendered in extreme detail.

GridMarkets & Shape Space VR | Virtual Reality Art and The Future
Kevin Mack is the creator of Shape Space VR - Zen Parade, a surreal virtual reality art experience that's designed to depict and inspire transcendent visions. Zen Parade was created procedurally in Houdini and rendered with Mantra. Mack is an Academy Award winning VFX pioneer. He received the Oscar for his work on What Dreams May Come. Other credits include; Fight Club, Big Fish, A Beautiful Mind, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Speed Racer, Ghost Rider, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Apollo 13, and more.

Kevin will show a selection of his virtual art; images, animation and 3D prints, as well as samples of his virtual reality art projects. He will talk about his path as an artist, career in VFX, and the role of Houdini in his work. He'll share thoughts on the future of virtual reality art, and talk about his recent experience with cloud rendering for Houdini using the GridMarkets.com platform.

MachinEyes | Virtual Reality, McCartney & the Octane Render Plugin for Houdini
Nick Young is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of MachinEyes, a boutique visual effects studio based in Los Angeles. Houdini has been a vital part of his studio's success while working on a wide range of commercial projects for Red Bull to Nike to television, film, and most recently, virtual reality with Jaunt Studios & musical legend Sir Paul McCartney.   

Nick will discuss how Houdini was used to procedurally animate in stereoscopic 360 around stereo lat/long footage of Paul McCartney captured in his London studio with Jaunt's Virtual Reality Camera. Nick will also demonstrate his use of the Octane Render plugin, a NVIDIA GPU rendering engine and how it was used within Houdini for the project. For more information about MachinEyes, please visit: machineyes.com

Method | Swarms & Macro Environments: Marvel’s Ant-Man
Peter takes Siggraph attendees through some of the Method team’s most challenging work on Marvel’s Ant-Man – creation of the macro environments and swarms that are Scott-as-Ant-Man’s world.

We’ll walk through the specifics of Method’s proprietary three-part swarming system, and show how it was applied on the shot where Ant-Man is covered with Crazy Ants (aka ‘puppies’). We’ll also show extensive use of Houdini in the creation of ant bridges, full CG ant tunnel environments, and outdoor asphalt environments.

Pixar | Break Down of Piper
“Piper", the new Pixar short that opened in front of "Finding Dory", is a story told from the perspective of a baby piper bird who sees the world just inches off the ground. From simulated individual sand grains, shallow depth-of-field and lapping waves, Vincent Serritella will cover the challenges of creating controllable and natural lapping beach waves by mixing both flip simulation and procedural techniques for post-processing data in Houdini.

Sony Pictures Imageworks | A System for the Simulation and Rendering of Large-Scale Beachbreak Environments
This presentation describes how a beachbreak of arbitrary width can be simulated using multiple, independent, overlapping FLIP simulations. If a particular section requires specialized adjustment, this can be done without impacting neighboring simulations. Surfacing is also performed in separate sections that appear seamless in the render, despite being physically unconnected. The system integrates non-simulated open ocean displacement and directional swells in the transition region between ocean and beachbreak. POPs simulation of whitewater and foam are also supported. Rendering is performed in Arnold/Katana.

Zoic | Houdini Pipeline Integration and Arrow VFX Breakdown
With less than 2 years since Zoic made its first Houdini license purchase, Houdini has already become Zoic's go-to application for complex effects work in our episodic, commercial, and film departments. We will be going over how Houdini's strong Python integration allowed Zoic to easily port over its core pipeline tools from Maya and Nuke. In addition, we will be diving into a couple of effects scenes from the hit CW television series Arrow.