Houdini HIVE at SIGG 2019

OTHER EVENTS

In addition to the Houdini HIVE, SideFX can be found at the following SIGGRAPH-related events:

SIDEFX MEETING ROOMS

PRESENTATION SCHEDULE

PRESENTERS

Come back to this page to learn more about the Presentation Schedule and Presenter Profiles.

SOLARIS Reveal: Layout, Look dev & Lighting

In this talk, Scott will introduce SideFX Solaris, a powerful new layout, look dev and lighting platform coming to Houdini 18 later this year. Solaris brings a robust set of dedicated tools to Houdini that are built on a native foundation of Pixar's USD initiative. Working in the new lighting context called LOPS, Scott will show you how these amazing new tools make it easy to support a fully integrated USD-based pipeline. There will also be a sneak peek demo of new rendering technology that you won't want to miss.

CG Blacksmithing

Is it that time of the year already? Previewing totally work-in-progress ideas that may or may never be released into the wild? This presentation is going to be a smörgåsbord of stuff that is currently cooking in the SideFX dev kitchen - modeling, UI and god knows what else. Sometimes you smell burning, but othertimes we also get pastry too! Drop by to check it out!

RenderMan for Houdini

Learn about Pixar's new RenderMan for Houdini plugin, completely rewritten to support the latest interactive workflows in RenderMan. Wayne Wooten will demonstrate RenderMan's greatly improved integration with Houdini, including interactive modeling, shading, and lighting. Wayne will also highlight features like seamless support for Houdini’s geometric attributes, volumetric rendering, and the addition of Pixar's powerful Preset Browser.

Science-Based Storytelling in Planetarium Show Production & Other Digital Media

Jeroen Lapré, Senior Technical Director of the Visualization Studio in the California Academy of Sciences, will talk about science-based storytelling for planetarium show production, and other media at the Academy. The “VIZ” Studio adapts tools and techniques from the film production, visual effects, digital animation, and real time computer graphics industries; to produce science media that is accessible to the general public. This talk will include how the procedural power of SideFX Houdini has become an important part of the studio pipeline over the years.

Learning Houdini: You're Doing It Wrong and How to do it Right

There's so many learning resources around, it must be easy to learn Houdini and get a job right? Having spent several years writing CGWiki, looking at hundreds of showreels, hiring lots of artists, and now teaching Houdini at a masters degree level at the UTS Animal Logic Academy, Matt has thought about what defines a strong FX artist. Using examples from his current students, he'll break down what skills are essential, and how to best demonstrate them in a reel. Seniors and supervisors are encouraged to agree/disagree loudly.

Enter the Phoenix

The presentation will showcase some of the dynamics simulations done by SOHO VFX.  Using Houdini's highly customizable procedural workflow allowed us to develop unique effects including the “Bamf” and “Entity” for Dark Phoenix.

Houdini Foundations: Pipeline in a Box

The procedural nature of Houdini gives artists a built-in pipeline-in-a-box experience. In this presentation, Robert will introduce you to the nodes, networks and assets that define the core of this workflow which allows for multiple iterations and changes deep in production. He will also explore how tools such as Houdini Engine and PDG let you build a studio-level solution that makes proceduralism available to the whole pipeline.

What is USD: A USD Primer

Universal Scene Description (USD) is open source software  designed to make it easier to "interchange and augment arbitrary 3D scenes that may be composed from many elemental assets." This is going to have a profound affect on how studios build pipelines in the future and with SideFX Solaris working natively with USD, it will be an important part of working with Houdini. Let's take a look at this new technology and how you can begin implementing it in your studio.

Terrain, PDG, and ML Sneak Peek

Houdini’s terrain tools have brought heightfield-generated environments to Houdini with tools for building up worlds and populating them with elements such as foliage and debris. This talk will take a quick look at the current state of the Height Field tools then show how Procedural Dependency Graphs and specifically the PDG technology of Mapping can allow the artist the freedom to procedurally generate content,  interrupt the procedural workflow with interactive adjustments, and then have proceduralism to take over to finish the solution. The talk will finish with a sneak peak of procedural terrain and machine learning tools being developed at SideFX.

Game Development Tools

This presentation will give a quick overview of the various tools the game dev team has been working on recently. We'll be covering how our development process has evolved over the years and we’ll be making a few surprise announcements and revealing the future of the Game Development Toolset. We will also explore some of the ways that artists can leverage the game dev tools in film and television projects.

Learning Houdini: You're Doing It Wrong and How to do it Right

There's so many learning resources around, it must be easy to learn Houdini and get a job right? Having spent several years writing CGWiki, looking at hundreds of showreels, hiring lots of artists, and now teaching Houdini at a masters degree level at the UTS Animal Logic Academy, Matt has thought about what defines a strong FX artist. Using examples from his current students, he'll break down what skills are essential, and how to best demonstrate them in a reel. Seniors and supervisors are encouraged to agree/disagree loudly.

Vellum Unveiled

The Houdini Vellum toolset introduces a streamlined approach to creating cloth, grain, string, and soft body simulations. In this presentation John will walk you through practical introductory applications of the Vellum toolset. We will also discuss the implementation of workflows useful for multiple parts of the pipeline, including production methodology for artists using either Houdini FX or Houdini Core.

Spider-Man’s Webs : His most Valuable Superpower

Pouyan will be demonstrating how we created organic looking spider webs from scratch for Spider-Man commercials. He will cover creating the geometry with curves, web shooting animation, dynamic simulation to show weight and movement and finally making shaders and rendering it.

Mortal Kombat 11: A Bloody Production Talk

Dive into the techniques and production lessons learned during the development of Mortal Kombat 11 with Houdini. We will focus on our geometry cache pipeline which allowed us to leverage Houdini’s fluid simulation tools to drive our unique cinematic blood effects. As a studio new to Houdini, we will give a behind the scenes look at some of our assets and share a little bit of the wisdom we’ve gained while ramping up on Houdini over a two year development cycle.

PDG as a Pipeline Tool for Small Teams

This talk is about how a small team could leverage PDG with mixed Maya-Houdini pipeline. We will examine a ROP-based pipeline Griot Groove has been using to get data in and out of Maya, and how the same goals could be easily achieved with PDG.

STOPS:  Dynamics for LAIKA Films

Laika's preferred dynamics isn't really a heck of a lot different from any other studio but we do stylize our work to meet established criteria for our show style, and we do need to be able to integrate our work with the stop motion animation. In short the work needs to look, animate, and feel realistic yet convey a sense that it was created on our stop motion stages using practical materials like paper or cloth.

Two Tricks to make your Procedural Shading Workflow more Efficient

Oliver will show you two techniques that made the procedural shading workflow at RISE much more efficient. First, he will talk about old-school texture-bombing. Even though this technique has been around for decades,  it is massively under-utilized because there is no out-of-the-box support for it in any render-package. Oliver will demonstrate the RISE texture-bomber on two shots from the Amazon series "Beat" and show you how to implement it in VEX. In the second part you will learn how RISE implemented a fully automated texture-baking process for large scale production scenes. It consists of VOP nodes that define bake-points in your shading-tree, a SOP node to setup the bake and a bit of python that analyzes your current scene and builds up all the necessary baketexture ROPs.

The Battle to End All Battles - Weta Digital Presents the FX of Avengers: Endgame

Starting with the destruction of the Avengers’ compound and diving deep into the lasers, thrusters, nano-tech, and the far-reaching power of the Infinity Stones, Weta Digital FX Supervisor Gerardo Aguilera presents how his team utilized the power of Houdini to bring it all together.Screen reader support enabled.    Starting with the destruction of the Avengers’ compound and diving deep into the lasers, thrusters, nano-tech, and the far-reaching power of the Infinity Stones, Weta Digital FX Supervisor Gerardo Aguilera presents how his team utilized the power of Houdini to bring it all together. 

Crowd Workshops 

It does not take an army of artists to make a crowd shot! This workshop is intended for generalists or small teams of versatile artists who wish to become familiar with the crowd toolset in Houdini. This three-part workshop covers the key concepts of a usual crowd workflow. Starting with rigging, we will see how to draw bones, capture a geometry and create a digital asset from our rig. Then, we will animate our character, set up agents and simulate the crowd. Finally, we will light, shade and render our scene.

SOLARIS Reveal: Layout, Look dev & Lighting

In this talk, Scott will introduce SideFX Solaris, a powerful new layout, look dev and lighting platform coming to Houdini 18 later this year. Solaris brings a robust set of dedicated tools to Houdini that are built on a native foundation of Pixar's USD initiative. Working in the new lighting context called LOPS, Scott will show you how these amazing new tools make it easy to support a fully integrated USD-based pipeline. There will also be a sneak peek demo of new rendering technology that you won't want to miss.