Houdini Games Workshop

There are two concurrent educational tracks - Artist and Technical. You'll choose one or the other during registration and stick with that track for the full day.

ARTIST TRACK (BEGINNER/INTERMEDIATE)

9a-10a | Robert Magee | Houdini Foundations

10a-11a | Moritz Schwind | Thinking Procedurally

11a-12p | Mihnea Stoica | KineFX Retargeting

12p-1p | LUNCH

1p-2p | Alan Gordie | Terrains

2p-3p | Danicka Oglesby | Vegetation

3p-3:45p | Mai Ao | New Tools in SideFX Labs

3:45p-4:15p | BREAK

4:15p-5p | Simon Verstraete | Building Generator

5p-6p | Simon Verstraete | Basic FX

6p-7p | Q&A

7p-9p | SOCIAL

TECHNICAL TRACK (ADVANCED)

9a-10a | Paul Ambrosiussen | Pivot Painter

10a-11a | Mai Ao | PDG / Automation

11a-12p | Ben Christensen | Advanced FX with VAT

12p-1p | LUNCH

1p-2p | Morgan Moore | Grooming for Games

2p-3p | Richard C. Thomas | Tool Building Best Practices

3p-3:45p | Paul Ambrossiussen | Python States

3:45p-4:15p | BREAK

4:15p-5p | Thomas Tobin | Procedural Robot / Sci-fi Ship

5p-6p | Erwin Heyms | Advanced Road Generation

6p-7p | Valentine Kozin | Karma, LookDev, and Ground Truth Rendering

7p-9p | SOCIAL

ARTIST TRACK (BEGINNER/INTERMEDIATE)

Houdini Foundations (Robert Magee)

Designed for artists new to Houdini, this workshop starts with an overview of the tools and techniques used to generate procedural game art. Learn how to create game assets using procedural nodes and networks then deploy them directly into Unreal using the Houdini Engine. Along the way, you will get to use different aspects of Houdini’s user interface. You will learn how the different UI elements work together to support you as you build your game assets.

Thinking Procedurally: Unleashing your inner artist and engineer. (Moritz Schwind)

This session will introduce artists to the challenges, possibilities and chances of working procedurally in Houdini. Based on abstract artworks, relying on seminal generative techniques, we'll explore the different approaches of working in Houdini and interfacing it with realtime engines.

KineFX Retargeting (Mihnea Stoica)

In this workshop we will go through the retargeting workflow in KineFX, with the aim of creating a simple, loopable, game-ready walk cycle. We will touch on importing our character and animation clip into Houdini, retarget the clip onto our custom character, create the animation loop, perform any additional minor clean ups that we might need and finish with exporting everything via .fbx and importing the result into Unreal engine. Houdini does not have to be difficult to learn and to illustrate this, Mihnea plans to use mostly interactive tools and promises to spend most of the time looking at pretty pictures and not numbers.

Terrain Basics (Alan Gordie)

In this beginner oriented session, you'll learn the basics of generating a heightfield terrain in Houdini along with masks to drive material layering in UE5. We'll use a combination of procedural techniques and user-directed blockout shapes to auto-sculpt the terrain.

Vegetation (Danicka Oglesby)

Want to create procedural vegetation assets for your projects? Learn how to rapidly generate vegetation and vegetation variants with Houdini’s procedural tools in this workshop. We’ll also show how to bring these assets together in Unreal and apply them to a virtual world.

New Tools in SideFX Labs (Mai Ao)

Mai shows you new tools and workflows for processing and UV-ing high-res geometries such as photogrammetry assets.

Building Generator (Simon Verstraete)

Recently a new building generator has been added to SideFX Labs. In this workshop you learn how to use this tool to generate buildings for Unreal Engine. Starting from scratch with using simple shapes the buildings are created and basics are explained on how to use the building tool. Megascans assets are then used with the tool to quickly create good looking results into the game engine.

Basic Real-time FX (Simon Verstraete)

This workshop will focus around using textures and flipbooks to make real-time FX. With Houdini we can do complex simulations like pyro simulation. The simulation will then be turned into a flipbook so it is usable for the game engine. Learn different ways and techniques on how to get and use the flipbooks of Houdini in Unreal engine.

TECHNICAL TRACK (ADVANCED)

PivotPainter (Paul Ambrosiussen)

In this session Paul will be teaching you how to encode custom data such as for example pivot points into data structures such as vertex colours, UVs and textures. The tool of choice for this will be the Labs PivotPainter tool, which has been developed specifically (but not only) for use with Unreal Engine. In this session we will also be looking at some user created examples to get an idea of the breath of possibilities with the tool, including how it was used for the collaboration between SideFX and Epic Games on the Matrix Awakens tech demo.

PDG / Automation (Mai Ao)

Learn how to use PDG to set up automated pipelines to batch process heavy assets while trying to maintain good performance.

Advanced FX with Conditional Vertex Animation Textures (Ben Christensen)

Ben shows how to use Houdini's Conditional Vertex Animation Textures technique to blend baked destruction simulation with dynamic gameplay inputs.

Grooming for Games Characters (Morgan Moore)

Learn the key steps in bringing a groom from Houdini into Unreal Engine.

Be More Moog: Tool Design That Empowers Users (Richard C. Thomas)

In this practical demonstration, we'll be discussing how to make tools that are intuitive, predictable, modular, flexingle and build insight through the use.

Python States (Paul Ambrosiussen)

In this session Paul will be teaching you the basics on how to get started with Python States to control interaction in the viewport. These states let you write custom behaviour based on input from mouse, pen, keyboard or any other input device. Using these essential skills you can let tools behave exactly the way you want them to. The learning outcomes of this session are a great primer to explore deeper into writing custom python code in Houdini specifically for Tool Development.

Build Blockouts - FAST (Thomas Tobin)

Let's take a look at shape generation in Houdini and how it can help us create robots/spaceships/blockouts quickly in an iterative fashion. By the end of the session, we will have a block out generator to quickly test new forms in Unity.

Advanced Road Editing (Erwin Heyms)

In this workshop Erwin will explain how to use his road network tools, recently added to the Sidefx LABS toolkit, to easily edit and manage complex road networks. Maintaining clean road networks is vital for expansive environments, be it for open worlds in video games, or procedural city generation. However, cutting and merging curves can quickly destroy the attributes that carry useful information, like the road width & road type. The new LABS “Merge Splines” & “Poly Scalpel” SOP nodes can be used to create and edit these complex networks or roads splines, while managing attributes, groups and curve direction. Combined with a few tricks of the trade, Erwin will demonstrate how managing and merging road splines and surfaces has never been easier.

Karma, LookDev, and Ground Truth Rendering (Valentine Kozin)

This session explores the principles of setting up your colour management workspace to achieve rendering parity between Houdini’s Karma renderer and your game engine, using Unreal Engine 5 as an example. It explores some of the practical applications of having a colour-matched viewport render in Houdini for iteration, look-dev and ground-truth rendering.

BIOS

Paul Ambrosiussen | Technical Artist and Owner, AMTA Consultancy

Tech Artist by nature, Paul has a wealth of experience building tools for Houdini and Unreal, as well as a deep desire to support creatives achieve efficient and effective art-pipelines. Knowledge gained from being the Lead at SideFX for the SideFXLabs initiative has given Paul deep insights into studio workflows as well as how to build tools used by over 25,000 creatives in the industry. In addition to building tools and architecting workflows, special projects with customers such as Epic Games and Quixel are no new thing to Paul. Want to learn more about Tech Art? Find Paul at conferences, training sessions and consultations around the world. https://www.ambrosiussen.com/

Mai Ao | Lead, SideFX Labs

Mai is the lead of SideFX Labs. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, he received an education in computer graphics, visual art, and project management. He worked in real-time productions on projects with Industrial Light & Magic and Walt Disney Imagineering, responsible for Houdini pipelines, FX, shaders, and performance optimization. At SideFX, Mai is passionate about serving the community and doing what he can to help push the boundaries of real-time technologies. He is mostly a nice guy, and his friends' cats tend to like him, if that's any indication.

Ben Christensen | Games Intern, SideFX

Ben is a games intern at SideFX.

Alan Gordie | Houdini Technical Artist, SideFX

Alan is one of the newest members of the SideFX Labs Team. He's a technical artist with a focus on and heavy interests in procedural and parametric modeling and texturing techniques. Though he has a background in C++ and Python and has many years experience developing corporate big data solutions, he generally prefers noding over coding and exploring parameter spaces.

Erwin Heyms - Houdini Technical Artist and Educator

With my focus on procedural world building, for the past decade I have worked on several triple-A titles at Ubisoft France, such as Ghost Recon Wildlands, Breakpoint & Riders Republic. Next to my work as a technical artist, I have created dozens of hours of Houdini Masterclass lectures at Ubisoft and hosted a range of workshops. This started me off on my own path as a Houdini Teacher and Consultant. Launching my own masterclass under the “E-Houdini Academy” Lecture program. With my latest 40 Hour “Houdini Foundation” course available for free on my E-Houdini Academy YouTube channel.

Valentine Kozin | Lead Technical Artist, Rare Ltd

Valentine first started in the industry when he taught himself C# and HLSL while studying for his Philosophy degree and spent his free time working as a graphics programmer and VFX artist on independent games. As a graduate, he found his place at Rare, where he has worked in the Technical Art team for the past 7 years. He has presented talks on the state-of-the-art graphics techniques and tools developed for Sea of Thieves at SIGGRAPH and at GDC. He is now the Lead Technical Artist on the upcoming Xbox title Everwild.

Robert Magee | Senior Product Marketing Manager, SideFX

Robert has been working with Houdini for 20 years. He has created lots of learning material and demos designed to help artists understand how going procedural with Houdini can benefit their work.

Morgan Moore | Junior Technical Artist, Rare Ltd

Morgan's work includes tasks such as grooming, tooling, simulations, and shaders. His recent work has focused on the grooming workflow from Houdini to Unreal Engine. He studied Computer Animation Technical Arts at Bournemouth University.

Danicka Oglesby | Houdini Technical Artist, SideFX

Danicka is a technical artist on the Labs team at SideFX. She enjoys creating tools and systems that solve common problems, ease workflow strain, and generally improve the quality of life for artists. She has worked previously as a gameplay programmer on VR experiences, on improving and maintaining a Houdini city generator pipeline, and on developing editor tools for artists in Unreal and Unity. With a background in mathematics and a strong interest in art, she completed Texas A&M's graduate program in Visualization to combine and elevate her two interests into the field of computer graphics.

Moritz Schwind | Co-founder, Entagma

Be it pixels, hardware, code or cameras – if it’s interesting, Moritz is gonna take it apart. And sometimes even reassemble it. In his spare time he likes to dabble with code and create generative artwork. He claims his early exposure to QBasic is no help at all when working in Houdini, Blender, Processing or Arduino. But it might have been what started his fascination for the boundaries of code and art. When not wreaking havoc to any intriguing devices around him, he works as a freelance Technical and Art Director. His more recent areas of interest cover the use of scientific algorithms in generative design and the application of AI in creative fields.

Mihnea Stoica | Character TD, SideFX

Mihnea is a Romanian Character TD working for SideFX Software. He graduated from Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands in 2020 and, after having completed an internship with SideFX, joined the team full-time. Since then, he has been working remotely from various corners of the world on the KineFX suite of tools.

Richard C. Thomas | Head of 3D (VFX), Jellyfish

My VFX journey began in Fine Art - studying to be a painter and sculptor before discovering computer graphics. My interest grew during my studies, producing digital art and writing on visual culture. I was awarded First Class Honors in Fine Art & History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London; after which I attended and graduated from the prestigious Royal Academy of Art for post-graduate study. In the last 17 years, I’ve worked across London at companies including The Mill, Man Vs Machine, Electric Theatre Collective, Analog, and most recently Framestore. I am currently Head of 3D (VFX) at Jellyfish Pictures, building the team, driving the department forward into new technology and opportunities, and making some pretty cool work for TV and Film. I continue to be passionate about creating for the community and sharing knowledge along the way on my learning journey.

Thomas Tobin | Senior Technical Artist, Unity

Sr. Technical artist working on Metacast/Sports @ Unity Technologies. Get to play with volumetric capture, environment generation, ML training and more in a new medium.

Simon Verstraete

Simon is a tech Artist that loves building procedural tools and assets. By adding more and more procedural approaches to his workflow, he is able to build 3D models with speed and flexibility. During his studies at Digital Arts and Entertainment, he taught himself how to work with Houdini. After his studies, he started working on Ary and the Secret of Seasons at eXiin. Currently he is a Houdini freelancer and focuses on creating procedural content.

ARTWORK FROM THE SIDEFX GALLERY - COURTESY OF MAO SUAREZ