Houdini HIVE at SIGGRAPH 2018

Louis Dunlevy is a prominent Houdini artist, who has crafted some of the world’s most complicated visual effects across the film, television, and creative industries for over 20 years.With a background as a graphic artist, Louis’ career began in Milan, Italy where he worked on many arthouse feature films and commercials. Having held senior roles at prestigious post studios and VFX houses across the globe such as Framestore, DNEG and ILM, Louis has played a major part in executing leading sequences for international feature films including Avengers – Age of Ultron, James Bond – Spectre, the Harry Potter series, Hellboy 2 – The Golden Age and many more. Louis is currently VFX Supervisor at Cutting Edge Studios in Brisbane.

>> Character Adventures in Houdini | TUES | Aug 14 | 9:00 AM 
We will be examining a few recent projects at Cutting Edge and looking at how Houdini has been used as the primary rigging and animation tool for some challenging character animation work and also examining some interesting uses of the crowd system applied to some fun critters! We’ll be looking at insects, robots and some very Australian mammals.

Matt Aitken  is one of Weta Digital’s most experienced Visual Effects Supervisors. He has recently finished supervising Weta Digital’s work on Avengers: Infinity War. Matt’s other projects as Visual Effects Supervisor include District 9, The Adventures of Tintin, Peter Jackson’s King Kong 360 3-D attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood, Iron Man 3 and all three films in The Hobbit trilogy. Matt has worked at Weta Digital since the early days of the company. Matt was Digital Models Supervisor on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, pre-production / R&D Supervisor for King Kong, and CG Supervisor for Avatar. Matt was nominated for the Academy Award® for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, and the BAFTA Film Award for Best Special Visual Effects, both for District 9. He has won multiple Visual Effects Society Awards. Matt has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Victoria University of Wellington and a Master of Science in Computer Graphics from Middlesex University, London. He has had technical papers published by Eurographics and Graphite and has given presentations on Weta Digital’s work at many conferences and festivals including SIGGRAPH, FMX, the Australian Effects and Animation Festival, Imagina, the London Effects and Animation Festival, and AnimfxNZ. Matt is an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences®, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the Visual Effects Society.

>> FX in Titan Battle in Avengers: Infinity War | TUES | Aug 14 | 10:00 AM 

Thomas Hullin moved from France to Montreal for the first time in 2009 where he obtained his degree in design and 3D animation at the NAD Center. He first carved out his place in the field of visual effects as a freelancer in Montreal. Thomas also visited ILM in Vancouver, where he worked on the Pacific Rim film. In 2015, after a short stint in Germany, he discovered Rodeo FX and moved back to Montreal to work as Lead FX artist. The quality of his work was noticed, especially in the realization of simulations on the Houdini platform, which led him to become Technical Director and CG FX supervisor. His roots, however, brought him back to Europe to perfect his post-production skills. Since November 2016, Thomas Hullin has Head of Studio and VFX Supervisor in the new Rodeo FX studio in Munich. Throughout his career, he has worked on the visual effects of Deadpool, The Legend of Tarzan and the Game of Thrones series, for which he won 2 VES Award in the category Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Episode, Commercial, or Real-Time Project.

>> Rodeo Pipeline: Game of Thrones and Paddington | Tues | Aug 14 | 11:00 AM 
In this session we will present our usage of Houdini at RodeoFX. From massive simulation on a falling wall, to their Houdini-to-Katana solution for hair.

Miles Green first joined Animal Logic in 2004 and currently supervises and leads the FX Department. Prior to joining Animal Logic, Miles worked at a number of companies based in London. Early in his career, he also taught 3D to students at the well established National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University in the UK. His recent credits include The LEGO Ninjago Movie, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, The LEGO Batman Movie. Previous credits include Legend of The Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole and the Academy Award winning Happy Feet.

>> Automating Character FX and FX for Peter Rabbit | Tues | Aug 14 | 12:00 PM 
Animal Logic had a challenge on Peter Rabbit to build their characterfx cloth and fur toolset from scratch, this talk covers how this toolset and others for fx shot production were built in Houdini into fully automated rigs.

Niall Flinn is originally from Northern Ireland and has been working in animation and VFX for TV and feature films for around 20 years. He has a background as a generalist but for most of his career he has specialized in FX simulations. After a decade of Maya experience, Niall made the switch to Houdini with his move to Method Studios 5 years ago and has never looked back. His feature credits include Thor: Ragnarok, San Andreas, Life of Pi, Sunshine, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. .

>> Splatter: High Quality Motion Blur for Meshed Liquids on Deadpool 2 | Tues | Aug 14 | 1:00 PM 
Simulated liquids are challenging to motion blur well, because their meshes have a changing point count. Niall Flinn presents the techniques Method Studios used to resolve this issue for flying blood and other fast-moving liquids in Deadpool 2. 

Kenneth Polonski is a Senior Lighting and Look Development Technical Director at The Embassy VFX. During his twelve years in the visual effects industry, Kenneth was a CG generalist that focused on lighting and rendering, with a passion for solving highly technical challenges and developing tools to help make the job as efficient as possible. He enjoys that every day presents and new challenge and that there is always something new to learn in this ever transforming industry.

>> Delayed Load Rendering Workflow at the Embassy VFX | Tues | Aug 14 | 1:30 PM 
Trying to handle large datasets, we came up with a deferred load workflow. Using our current alembic in house tools, the data is extracted into houdini’s packed prims, and a point cloud of instance data. The benefits are: Faster and smaller IFD files; Multiples of assets are inherently instances of each other; Lighter and more manageable scene for the lighting artist 

Keith Kamholz is an experienced FX Technical Director and destruction specialist with 10 years experience working on feature films and commercials. Prior to his current position at DNEG, he's worked at Industrial Light & Magic, Blue Sky Studios, Tippett Studio, Framestore NY, and Absolute Post. His career includes 15+ major films, with highlights including Transformers: Age Of Extinction, Jurassic World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and an FX Lead role on Pacific Rim: Uprising. Prior to working in the industry, Keith completed a dual-major BA degree in Computer Science & Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, and an MS graduate degree in Digital Imaging and Design at NYU's CADA.

>> Destruction Workflows | Tues | Aug 14 | 10:30 PM 
In this talk, destruction specialist Keith Kamholz discusses various challenges that this type of work presents, and how he approaches those challenges to determine the best technique for the job. The presentation includes examples from his work on various projects.

>> 5 Elements of VFX - Earth | Tues | Aug 14 | 2:00 PM 
The ‘Elements of VFX’ series features segments on Water, Fire, Earth, Wood, and Metal, each presented by a different Houdini expert who will bring their own experience and wisdom to the topic. In this session, destruction specialist Keith Kamholz presents a compelling Earth FX example, incorporating a combination of terrain generation tools, crowds, RBD destruction, and more.

Jiayin Wang is an FX Lead at DNEG. She joined the studio in 2016 and has recently completed Deadpool 2. As lead she supports the FX Supervisor and Production Teams to ensure artists deliver the highest quality of work while also developing setups and lookDev tasks to define the looks of the FX. Before joining DNEG she worked as an FX Artist at Deluxe VFX from 2015 to early 2016. Her filmography includes films such as First Man, Deadpool 2, Blade Runner 2049, The Mummy and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

>>Ant-Man and the Wasp / Deadpool 2 | Tues | Aug 14 | 3:00 PM 
Jiayin Wang and Shaun Roth will talk about the challenges working on Deadpool 2 created for the FX team and how Houdini helped them create procedural effects for bespoke looks. On top of this, they will walk through what working in an R rated film is like... or more appropriately... how much fun it is to make gore in Houdini.

Shaun Roth  joined DNEG in 2011 where he moved up the ranks to FX Supervisor and most recently Head of FX at their Vancouver Studio. He has worked in FX Supervsion for films such as The Fate of the Furious and Star Trek - Beyond and as a TD on films including John Carter, Thor 2, The Book of Exodus and Captain America - The First Avenger. Among his many credits, a highlight of his career was working as lead on the blackhole from the film Interstellar. Before DNEG he worked for Zoic, and for Warner Brothers on the hit TV show Supernatural.

>>Ant-Man and the Wasp / Deadpool 2 | Tues | Aug 14 | 3:00 PM 
Jiayin Wang and Shaun Roth will talk about the challenges working on Deadpool 2 created for the FX team and how Houdini helped them create procedural effects for bespoke looks. On top of this, they will walk through what working in an R rated film is like... or more appropriately... how much fun it is to make gore in Houdini.

Gero Grimm  is a highly talented FX TD at DNEG. Since joining DNEG in 2015 he has worked on films such as Terminator Genisys, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Pacific Rim: Uprising and Ant-Man and the Wasp. Gero started his VFX career in his early 20s as an intern in a small company in Berlin. He then worked as a freelance artist for TV and Hollywood productions like 'Cloudatlas' and 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'.

>>Ant-Man and the Wasp / Deadpool 2 | Tues | Aug 14 | 3:00 PM 
Gero Grimm will be talking about how immensely helpful Houdini was in handling more than 500 shots on Ant-man and The Wasp and the techniques used to handle a large volume of shots. Using Houdinis biggest strength: proceduralism, he will be breaking down the wide variety of effects starting with the micro world of Ant-man and the challenges this incurred. Gero will also elaborate on what techniques helped on the more abstract effects such as fritzing on the antagonist Ghost and how to deal with an exploding Quantum tunnel.

Jeffrey Charles Higgins  is a FX Lead at  Digital Domain. Born and Raised in Toronto, Jeff's has been living in Vancouver for almost 10 years now with a career in Visual Effects spanning almost 15 years. His tenure at Digital Domain started with Ready Player One, but he has been involved also on Shadow, Avengers: Infinity War, and most recently Ant-Man and the Wasp.

>> Hologramming in Ready Player One | Tues | Aug 14 | 4:00 PM
Digital Domain endeavoured to bring a fresh new take on a hologram that's both grounded in reality of plausible near future technology as well as beautiful and interesting without taking away from Wade Watt's Avatar Parzival's performance for Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. Using Houdini, almost exclusively, the FX team generated complex geometry and motion to bring the hologram to life under the creative direction of our VFX Supervisor Matthew Butler, and the talented Compositing Team. DD collaborated with ILM which provided geometry and lighting renders of their Parzival character. Each shot was creatively driven based on the needs of the hologram.

James Halverson is a Hologram Lookdev Artist at Digital Domain. A local denizen of Vancouver, James has been working in various aspects of visual effects for the last 18 years with a focus on FX and Houdini for the last 9.  Most recently he’s been working at Digital Domain on several projects including Ready Player One, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Avengers: Infinity War.

>> Hologramming in Ready Player One | Tues | Aug 14 | 4:00 PM
Digital Domain endeavoured to bring a fresh new take on a hologram that's both grounded in reality of plausible near future technology as well as beautiful and interesting without taking away from Wade Watt's Avatar Parzival's performance for Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. Using Houdini, almost exclusively, the FX team generated complex geometry and motion to bring the hologram to life under the creative direction of our VFX Supervisor Matthew Butler, and the talented Compositing Team. DD collaborated with ILM which provided geometry and lighting renders of their Parzival character. Each shot was creatively driven based on the needs of the hologram.

Matt Estela  is VFX Lead in Residence at The Animal Logic Academy, University of Technology Sydney. He teaches VFX and VR as part of a Masters of Animation and Visualization. Matt also maintains CGWiki, a popular website for Houdini training, and prior to UTS spent nearly 10 years at Animal Logic in Lighting, FX and CG supervisor roles.

>> Hypercubes for VR Noobs | Wed | Aug 15 | 12:00 PM
The script for 'Awake' by StartVR starts with "A beautiful glyph of light transforms in front of your eyes". I'll show how I used Houdini to explore that brief, how I created an art directable animated hypercube, and how I got that running in realtime VR. I'll also explore the visual effects we had to develop for the project, and how Houdini's Game Development Toolset formed a core part of our workflow.

Jeremy Kersey is a Senior Technical Artist at Microsoft Vancouver's BigPark studio which is currently developing the runtime engine that powers 3D across Office 365 and Windows 10. His passion for tech art and real time graphics started with over 10 years in games development at local studios Radical Entertainment, EA BlackBox, Next Level Games and Slant Six Games. Since joining Microsoft in 2013 he has enjoyed working on a wide variety projects including interactive video apps for Xbox, HoloLens and Mixed Reality development. The Transformation Mask collaboration provided a new tech art challenge that he simply could not pass up.

>> Transformation Mask: Production Challenges of 3D Fabrication | Wed | Aug 15 | 3:00 PM 
Transformation Mask is a shared work created by Shawn Hunt and a team of artists, designers and engineers at Microsoft Vancouver. In this talk we will cover how we leveraged Houdini’s procedural nature to overcome the production challenges of fabricating the mask as well as thoughts on future improvements for 3D printing workflows.

Robert Butterworth is a Senior Technical Artist at Microsoft Vancouver’s MR Studio creating software for the modern workplace. For the past 18 years he has been building software and hardware solutions in both Games and Mixed Reality. Prior to joining Microsoft he has worked at United Front Games, Capcom, Slant Six Games and Krome Studios back in his homeland Australia. During the Transformation Mask collaboration, Rob worked on the mechatronics designing custom electronics and hardware to support the 3D printed form and mechanical articulation.

>> Transformation Mask: Production Challenges of 3D Fabrication | Wed | Aug 15 | 3:00 PM 
Transformation Mask is a shared work created by Shawn Hunt and a team of artists, designers and engineers at Microsoft Vancouver. In this talk we will cover how we leveraged Houdini’s procedural nature to overcome the production challenges of fabricating the mask as well as thoughts on future improvements for 3D printing workflows.

Kenny Lammers began his career in the game industry with an internship at Surreal Software in 1999. Since then he has worked at Microsoft, Activision, and owned his own business. He has worked on many AAA titles including, Call of Duty 3, Spiderman 3, Mua 2, Alan Wake, Kinectimals, and Star Wars Kinect. While at Ozone-Interactive he worked and consulted with Amazon, BioLucid, Univeristy of Washington, Eline-Media, and Microsoft. His passions lie in Unity Tools creation, Procedural Content Creation, and programming for all types of interactive media.

>> Procedural Workflows For Unity Game Artists | Wed | Aug 15 | 4:00 PM 
Procedural workflows are becoming almost a necessity in our modern game pipelines. We have to create more content while keeping the content flexible and iterative. In this presentation we are going to walk through how Houdini and the Houdini engine, with Unity 2018, gives artists and designers the flexibility to iterate on designs and game assets. Using the power of Houdini’s procedural workflows game artists have ability to create their own procedural game assets that can change shape, update uv’s, add more or less detail, without having to leave the Unity editor. We will look at a few case studies and learn the different ways we can insert Houdini’s procedural workflows into your current game production pipelines.

Oliver Markowski is the CG Supervisor at RISE | Visual Effects Studios’ Munich facility. Before joining the RISE team, Oliver previously worked as a Freelancer for notable companies including Scanline, Trixter, Mackevision and Framestore. Oliver is an active board member of the German section of the Visual Effects Society and a proud self-dubbed geek who builds gadgets like his own low-budget mini light-stage for face scanning in his spare time.

>> Does your modelling department suck? | Thurs | Aug 15 | 9:30 AM
An Automated Assessment of How Much Your Modelling Department Sucks: RISE’s Oliver presents how to quality-check your 3d models in SOPs to make sure that your texturing and rigging department will not complain about common errors. We will end up having a full-blown model-turntable rendering which contains an error summary for your supervisor and AOVs to visualize those errors for the artist.

Andrew Lowell’s career in the arts started in music recording/mixing and also branched into video editing, compositing, and 3D FX; Eventually breaking into the VFX industry in Los Angeles. Thereafter his career has spanned several countries, and major studios such as Rhythm and Hues, CIS Vancouver, Animal Logic, and Digital Domain. Andrew’s professional growth in the field was fuelled by keeping his skill set diverse; continually taking on the most challenging projects and innovative shotwork.

>> Methodologies in FX Simulation | Thurs | Aug 15 | 11:00 AM
Simulation, particularly fluid simulation is known to be the most difficult area of FX. This talk will address a merger of tried and true (old school) low level SOPs workflows which can be honed in key aspects of reference matching, lookdev and motion sculpting. Then progress into simulation and testing. In complement the latest workflows in DOPs fluids and grains will be highlighted and discussed. The FX artist can take back knowledge to hone their simulation workflows through the process of dealing with unpredictable results and high resolutions. A full geometry i/o to simulation and rendering will give a global picture of any tough fluid dynamics task.

Ben Watts is a Houdini FX artist from Swan Hill, Australia who works on a wide variety of projects and collaborate with many different studios worldwide. He has gained valuable experience creating a range of FX. Some include: Fire, Smoke, Destruction, Liquids, Particles & Procedural based FX. As a freelancer you often learn a bit of everything whilst working on personal projects, and over the years he's gained essential experience Lighting, Rendering & Compositing. Ben looks forward to expanding his knowledge of Houdini and FX skillset in the years ahead.

>> Design Through FX | Thurs | Aug 15 | 12:00 PM
I’ll be discussing my personal journey into Houdini, and demonstrate intuitive ways I design and control FX. After that, we’ll take a look at some FX I’ve created for studio projects.

Mike Lyndon is a Sr. Technical Artist at SideFX. He has a broad range of experience creating computer graphics for commercials, films and video games. His fascination with the world around us and the desire to blend art with his technical tinkering has led to his work making rolling cloudscapes in Ender's Game, generating raging fires in Gears of War 4 and trapping penguins in an avalanche of snow for Happy Feet 2. He is a part of our games team and responsible for developing tools to bridge the gap between Houdini and realtime applications.

>> Enhanced Realtime Workflows | Wed | Aug 15 | 1:00 PM
Mike Lyndon will show you how to do more with less. Distribute your work load to other teams and speed up those annoying time sinks that pull you out of your flow. We’ll cover destruction workflows, UE4’s niagara integration, building tools for Maya and a host of other updates the Game Development team have been working on.

Scott Keating is a Senior Product Designer 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.

>> 5 Elements of VFX: Fire | Wed | Aug 15 | 2:00 PM
A walkthough of the methods used to create a blossoming fire flower. We will cover managing data from geometry and particles, working with wedges, and how to customize forces to create believable non-physical effects. 

John Moncrief is the Education Training Lead at SideFX. Previously, he was the Resident Dynamics Instructor and Dynamics Curriculum Manager at Pluralsight Creative. John has been teaching various visual effects software packages to creative industry professionals for more than 15 years. He lives for the rush of seeing his pupils experience "light bulb" moments. His latest passion is making sure that no software or tools can get in the way of an artist expressing their creative vision.

>> Houdini Concepts for the Maya Artist | Thurs | Aug 16 | 9:00 AM
One of the hardest things to do is to transfer skills from one software to another especially if the interface and workflows are new to you. John will make this easier for Maya artists coming to Houdini as he explains how Houdini works from a Maya point of view. 

Robert Magee is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SideFX who has been working with Houdini for over 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.

>> Houdini Foundations: Particles & Dynamics | Thurs | Aug 16 | 10:00 AM 
For artists new to Houdini, this presentation will help you understand how particles and dynamics work within Houdini's node-based workflow. Learn how you can source geometry and use that to create Particle, Bullet Rigid Body and Pyro FX simulations.

>> H17 Sneak Peek - PolyDraw 1.0 | Thur | Aug 16 | 1:00 PM
Wishing you could use TopoBuild for modeling and not only for rebuilding high-res geo? We will take a look at an early reveal of a new tool for modeling in Houdini, which is currently under development. This tool allows you to draw geometry and build on either existing geometry or from nothing, in an empty scene.