UNDERSTAND GEOMETRY REPRESENTATIONS

You’ll develop a practical understanding of how points, meshes, and SDFs work under the hood — what data they store, how they represent surfaces or volumes, and how that affects common geometric queries like ray intersections, closest point searches, distance evaluation, and inside/outside tests. The video also explains why acceleration structures are so important, and why some operations are cheap in one representation but expensive in another.

On the volumetric side, you’ll see how SDFs behave in Houdini with OpenVDB: voxel resolution, narrow bands, interpolation, clamping, and how memory usage grows with resolution. Through examples like collision detection, force fields, and attribute-driven effects, you’ll understand not just how to use these representations, but when and why to use each one.