Michael Holman

Hi! I'm an independent filmmaker, and I'm excited about the possibilities of 3d animation with regards to making animated films, especially in that (with appropriate technical skill) anything I imagine can be brought to life. Here's the thing:

I KNOW NOTHING.

I dabbled a bit in Blender several years ago, but never got anything more complex than generating basic shapes and putting textures on them, or painstakingly following an online tutorial but not understanding how it is that I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm looking at Houdini instead because Blender's UI is just incomprehensible to me and I have no idea what anything does. It seems, though, that there is a massive learning curve everywhere I go, with whatever software.

My question is: where can I go to find a step-by-step guide to learning 3d animation with Houdini from the absolute beginning, which will show me what I need to know in order to get on the path to making animated movies? 3d animation appears to be so technical to me, more like a science, and yet it seems there's a point at which, when you know how everything works, it can become an art; I just want to get to that point.

To recap: where can I go where all the information is in order to teach you, step by step, how to use Houdini?