Houdini 19.5 Launch and Games Workshop

Location: NAD - École des arts numériques, de l’animation et du design, 1501 Rue de Bleury, #7e étage, Montréal, QC H3A 0H3

Join us for a day of learning focused on using Houdini for game development. There are two concurrent tracks - Artist and Technical. Choose one or the other during registration and stick with that track for the full day.

The sessions are being recorded and will be available at some point after the event.

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 FX6p-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, flexible 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.