About the Course

This 45 Minute Lecture was originally given to the Vancouver Houdini User Group in August 2016. It is a talk that was designed for an audience familiar with feature film visual effects workflows, specifically those which use Houdini. The goal is to increase awareness of limitations in real-time game environments, and to help film makers take steps towards transitioning into interactive media.

Feature film effects artists are typically used to working with millions or particles, polygons, and voxels. While it's acceptable for a render farm to chew through heavy data over the course of several hours for film; current game platforms are not designed with this kind of geometry in mind. It's up to the effects artist to understand this and produce visuals that are as light-weight as they are beautiful so that game engines can spend their efforts on more than just the visuals.

This is not designed to be a step-by-step tutorial for making a "pretty" effect, but rather a general purpose guide geared at introducing a broad topic. If you are interested in transitioning from film to games, this talk may be useful as a primer as we'll introduce concepts such as: sprite sheets, power of two dimensions, texture packing, particle trimming, letting the GPU handle transformations, and vertex animation. Topics are introduced in a way that should build upon concepts that are already familiar to those with training in the motion picture discipline. All examples in this lecture are given using Houdini 15.5.523 and Unreal Engine 4.12.5.

The example files may be downloaded and examined at the student's own leisure.

To view the course, go to: https://www.udemy.com/game-effects-using-houdini-ue4

To support the author, go to: https://gofundme.com/AllegroDigital

About the Author

After attaining a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Animation from Sheridan College, Stephen G. Tucker went on to work as a Product Specialist at Side Effects Software Inc, before beginning his career in film and games. He has worked as a visual effects artist and technical director in both fully animated and live action films at Starz Animation, Dr. D, and Digital Domain. Recently, he completed work on Microsoft’s Gears of War 4.

Find out More about the Author: http://www.allegrodigital.com

What are the requirements?

  • The audience should be familiar with 3D Visual Effects workflows. This means understanding basic math, and concepts such as UVs, Normals, and node based workflows.
  • Basic familiarity with Houdini is required to get the most out of the presentation.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • take visual effects knowledge you've gained through working with Houdini in the motion picture industry, and understand the basics of how to apply it to the video game industry.
  • understand the importance of optimization in real time visual effects.

What is the target audience?

  • Experienced visual effects artists who have worked in a professional film environment.
  • Those who are looking for a transition from film to video game visual effects.
  • Those who are looking for a broad introduction without the slow step-by-step procedures typically offered in tutorials.

CREATED BY

Allegro
STEPHEN TUCKER

After attaining a BAA in Animation from Sheridan College, Stephen G. Tucker went on to work as a Product Specialist at Side Effects Software Inc, before beginning his career in film and games. He has worked as a visual effects artist and technical director in both fully animated and live action films at Starz Animation, Dr. D, and Digital Domain. He has also worked as a visual effects artist in the game industry and has worked on titles including: Gears of War 4, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Star Wars Battlefront II, Shape of The World, Battlefield V, The Darwin Project, and SEASON: A letter to the future. He currently works remotely as a Visual Effects Artist at The Believer Company from Montréal.

More from Stephen Tucker

COMMENTS

  • Dryrainstudios 8 years, 2 months ago  | 

    Cheers Stephen.
    Awesome work, even better the second time round!!

  • BrianWong 8 years, 2 months ago  | 

    good

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