Game Developers Conference 2017

Hair FX in Games
Saber Jlassi is a California-based VFX artist working as a Senior Technical Director at Blizzard Animation, as well as a Houdini instructor at CG Master Academy. His current job consists of writing tools and scripts to improve the Lighting, FX and Compositing pipeline, in addition to collaborating with Production to solve challenging tasks. Prior to this, he worked as a Senior Lighting TD at Framestore and Generalist TD at MPC in London.

In his talk, Saber will create a custom grooming system from scratch that offers most of the features found in high-end grooming tools, and learn how to manipulate the hair look and create custom deformers. Then he will take a high resolution hair model and setup a Houdini network to generate a game-compatible version using geometry mapping with baked textures that will appear very close to a high-res hair model when viewed in real-time. Then he will show how to translate the high-res hair into a highres real-time version using Nvidia hair-works system.

Realtime FX | Battlefield 1 
Andreas has spent over 8 years working as a VFX artist in the games industry. During that time he has worked on projects like Battlefield 1 and Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Right now he is running a remote VFX company called Partikel while studying Mechanical Engineering as a side project.

His presentation will cover Realtime VFX techniques forged in the trenches of Battlefield 1. The talk will include a walkthrough of how to crerate the meshes needed for goopy, shiny, nasty, volumetric looking liquid effects. He will also explain how his team took some Houdini clouds and turned them into a dogfighting paradise in a game level set in the skies over London. The talk is tailored to beginners so even people new to Houdini will be able to follow along and perhaps apply the techniques to their own game.

Terrain Generation
In his booth presentation, Alex will be  going over the basics of the Houdini 16 Terrain Generation tools showing how he used them to help create a real-time environment in Unreal Engine 4. This overview will give audiences a small glance into the potential of these new tools, while exploring an example of how they can fit into a game production pipeline.

In his Houdini Day class, Alex will take an intermediate-level look at the H16 heightfield Terrain tools including a basic demonstration of a simple terrain being exported to Unreal Engine 4. Afterward, he'll show off a finished project he created to demonstrate the potential use of heightfields in game production environments. In the end he will share some tips and tricks he learned along the way.

Feline Arts | Multi-Platfrom Procedural Art for Indies | Unity
Luis Garcia, also known as “Lune” Is an indie game developer at “Feline Arts”, based in Mexico, mostly with a 3d artist background Lune is currently working on the project “Suki & the Shadow Klaw” for Playstation 4, Xbox One, Playstation Vita and PC platforms.

Pluralsight | Intro to Houdini 
John is the resident Houdini and dynamics author at Pluralsight. In college, he had the opportunity to work at SideFX as an intern and has been able to teach dynamics and visual effects to numerous creative industry professionals over the years. He lives for the rush of seeing his pupils experience "light bulb" moments. John's latest passion has been breathing new life into the Pluralsight Houdini training library and making sure that no software or tools can get in the way of an artist expressing their creative vision. 

If you are new to Houdini and ready to experience your own "light bulb" moment, join John on Houdini Day for his Intro to Houdini class.

SideFX | What's New in Houdini 16
Scott Keating is a production specialist at SideFX specializing in the user experience needs of Houdini artists. He is also an award-winning commercial illustrator, designer, and comic-book artist and his work has been published worldwide, in magazines, books, comics, and commercial products.

Scott will be talking about all the new features found in Houdini 16 that will help game developers create procedural game art. He will be reviewing all the new features in the booth presentation and taking a more in-depth look in his Houdini Day talk.

SideFX | Realtime FX
Luiz is a Sr. Technical Artist at SideFX Software. He is a part of our games team and responsible for developing tools to bridge the gap between Houdini and Game Engines. 

In his booth presentation, Luiz will show the new Games Tool Shelf that is included with Houdini 16. He will go over the new normal map nodes for COPs, Flowmap Tools, Make Loop SOP, RBD to FBX exporter, and the new Vertex Animation Texture workflows to get meshes with changing topology from Houdini into Unreal. On Houdini Day he will be going into more detail on how these nodes work and how to modify them to fit production pipeline needs. 

SideFX | Castle Defense VR

SideFX | Procedural Assets in UE4
Robert Magee is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SideFX who has been working with Houdini for 15 years. He has created lots of learning material and demos designed to help artists understand how going procedural with Houdini can benefit their work.

In his presentation and Houdini Day lesson, Robert will show how you can create procedural assets in Houdini that can be loaded into Unreal Engine 4 using the Houdini Engine plug-in. He will talk about how assets can be built in Houdini's node-based environment and then how to best deploy them into the game engine.