GDC 2025 | SideFX

SideFX is coming to GDC this year with three sponsored sessions and a room for private meetings.

We look forward to seeing you!

Meetings will take place at the Canopy By Hilton

Tuesday and Wednesday | 9AM - 5PM | 250 4th St, San Francisco | Room SOMA 1.

Contact SideFX to set up a Meeting

Sponsored Sessions will be in the Moscone Center and will require at least an Exhibit pass for entry.

Twisting Terrain and Populating Forests on an Anomalized Olympic Peninsula for Pacific Drive

Karl Kohlman & Kendall Wix | IRONWOOD STUDIOS

As an indie game studio, Ironwood Studios needed an efficient way to make a massive number of bespoke maps for their game, Pacific Drive, but with only a small team to do so. Utilizing Houdini Engine for Unreal and with the help of a proprietary UE plugin, they created a suite of tools to empower a much smaller team to create and decorate a large library of dense and diverse maps.

Karl Kohlman (tech artist) will cover the general methodologies used to refine rough terrain sculpts into shippable landscapes, generating maps for landscape material layers, controllable blending of biomes, road spline incorporation and terrain modification, and foliage scattering based on all of the aforementioned data.

Kendall Wix (level designer) will cover the end user experience, how he incorporated the tools into his work flow, as well as the myriad of benefits the tools provided.

Karl Kohlman has been a Tech Artist on the Pacific Drive team for 4 years and currently resides in Placencia, Belize. His previous game experience includes FX work for Halo 5 and tech art work for a currently unannounced FPS. Karl spent the majority of his career in VFX for film, working at Digital Domain, Laika, Rhythm and Hues, Method Studios, and as FX supervisor for Tau Films, after starting his career as a SESI intern in Santa Monica, CA. Through Houdini Engine and Houdini Labs, he is able to bring his many years of film experience to various tools and FX in Unreal.

Kendall Wix is a Level Designer based in Charlotte, North Carolina, specializing in Unreal Engine and Unity. He is the current Level Designer at Ironwood Studios for Pacific Drive. Kendall previously worked on projects such as Axel Smooth, an arcade game that sits inside the Super Abari Game Bar in Charlotte, and Once Upon a Puppet, a soon-to-be-released puzzle platformer. Early on, Kendall's work with various level editors, such as Far Cry's Dunia Engine and Halo 3's Forge, set the foundation for his career in the industry.

Tool Development Principles from the

Houdini Game Tools Team

Mai Ao | SIDEFX

Based on his years of experience as a technical artist and then as a team lead at SideFX Labs, creating game tools widely used in the industry, Mai will share with you a list of principles he follows in tool development, such as how to understand the artists, how to nurture your motivation and support your teammates, how to navigate tough problems, and how to not give up in the face of uncertainty. With real production anecdotes, tales of successes and failures, Mai will discuss how he learned these lessons and why they might be helpful in your own tool development journey.

Mai Ao is the Senior Technical Lead of SideFX Labs with 7 years of Houdini and game industry experience and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Early in his career, he worked on high-profile real-time projects in collaboration with Walt Disney Imagineering and Industrial Light & Magic. At SideFX, he now leads a team of technical artists to create production-ready, artist-friendly Houdini tools for the Labs open-source package and provides technical consultation to game studios. He has released many popular game dev tools, including the exporters and shaders for vertex animation textures and flipbook textures, which are widely used across the industry in both AAA and indie titles. Passionate about mathematics and solving practical problems, Mai has developed new algorithms and techniques such as multi-revolutions-per-frame quaternion slerp, high-frequency icosahedral normal compression, spectral feature extraction, conditional VAT, and more. He has delivered talks on tech art, real-time VFX, and programming at SIGGRAPH, GDC, Inside Unreal, and the Everything Procedural Conference.

Moba: Non Destructive Pipelines

Cody Spahr | SIDEFX

In this technical session, Cody explores the challenges and solutions of implementing procedural generation systems at production scale. While procedural workflows excel at initial environment creation, development teams often face significant hurdles when iterating and modifying large-scale environments during production. Using an internal Moba Desinger tool as context, Cody examines how traditional procedural systems can break down under the demands of production changes and feature additions. The presentation introduces strategies for creating non-destructive workflows that maintain the efficiency of procedural generation while accommodating the practical needs of large-scale game development.

Cody Spahr is a technical artist at SideFX working with the Pipeline team, where his focus is on game development solutions, education and support. Cody has a background in the games industry as a 3D artist, and has a passion for procedural art and content generation.