Monday Nov 7 | 10:00 AM EST
Education Program Update

SideFX supports students, artists and educators at every stage of their learning journey. Let's discover how to make the most of custom learning resources, license offerings and community connections to build Houdini talent at your school and studio.

John Moncrief is the Education & Training Manager at SideFX. John has been teaching various visual effects software packages to creative industry professionals for more than 20 years. He lives for the rush of seeing students experience "light bulb" moments! 

Sam Miller is Senior Education Coordinator at SideFX. She administers the Houdini Insight learning platform and supports the Houdini Educator Community. She enjoys pizza and comedy in her spare time.

Peter Arcara is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. He loves watching rocket launches and F1 races in his free time.

Nicole Campbell has 10 years experience working with industry professionals to create top notch training content for Visual effects studios and schools. She’s native to Oklahoma, and aside from spending time with her friends and being outside in nature she enjoys doing anything with her 8 year old daughter.

Monday Nov 7 | 10:30 AM EST
Forager: Mushroom Timelapse Photogrammetry

Elie and Winslow will discuss their new volumetric time-lapse mushroom experience Forager, and how Houdini's unique and powerful toolset help make it possible.

Elie Zananiri is an award-winning new media artist, designer, computer programmer, and educator. He specializes in large-scale installations, graphics programming, and virtual reality that redefines social boundaries in public spaces through immersive experiences and generative compositions. Elie has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, notably an Emmy Award for Zero Days VR (2018). Zananiri’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival (USA), Tribeca Film Festival (USA), Sónar (Spain), Venice Biennale (Italy), Plásmata Exhibition (Greece), Typ09 (Mexico), and Resonate (Serbia). Elie currently teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and develops media exhibits for the American Museum of Natural History. He is a regular contributor to open-source software projects, including the Processing and openFrameworks creative coding toolkits. 

Winslow Porter is an award-winning director, producer and creative technologist specializing in virtual/augmented reality as well as large-scale immersive installations. Winslow formed the pioneering, new media studio the New Reality Company in 2016 with Milica Zec, creating the critically-acclaimed cinematic VR experiences Giant and Tree. He is currently a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, a seven-time mentor at the New Museum Incubator, a founding member of ONX Studio and an adjunct NYU Tisch professor. Winslow is also an artist in residence at the Smallhold Mushroom farm in Brooklyn, creating an immersive experience featuring the first volumetric time-lapse of mushrooms growing called Forager, featured at SIGGRAPH 2022 and Unreal Fest 2022 (forager.earth)

Monday Nov 7 | 11:30 AM EST
Top 10 Reasons for Virtual Production Artists
to Learn Houdini

Virtual production provides an exciting new direction for filmmaking that replaces green screens with a volume that provides an immersive experience for actors. Houdini can play an important part in feeding optimized  assets into the volume through a real time application such as Unreal. This virtual artwork surrounds the actors with the virtual world inspiring their performance.

Robert Magee is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SideFX who has been working with Houdini for over 20 years. He has created lots of learning material and demos designed to help artists understand how going procedural with Houdini can benefit their work.

Monday Nov 7 | 1:30 PM EST
Reel Review

Bring your demo reel and get feedback from industry experts. Learn how well your work stacks up and what you can do to improve your work before you go out job searching.

Debra Isaac is a visual artist, animator, and the founder of Houdini.School. She teaches at UCLA in the Design Media Arts Dept. and has over 10 years of experience teaching Houdini. She loves community building, hosts monthly Houdini Battles, and co-organizes The Los Angeles Houdini User group (LAHUG). She is passionate about scientific visualization, motion graphics, and emerging technologies. Her clients have included Intel, Mattel, and The UCLA Art|Sci Center. 

John Kalaigian is a CG Supervisor at Hornet in New York City, where his primary focus is building and supporting a diverse group of talented 3D artists, in service of creating stunning visuals for commercial projects. He is helping to chart new approaches to maximizing Hornet's next generation CG pipeline and production tracking, centered on a software agnostic workflow, inclusive of Houdini and Unreal Engine. Prior to Hornet, John was a Senior Technical Director at Blue Sky Studios for 9 years. During this time, he applied his creative and technical skills to build robust and efficient environments and artist facing workflows for Epic, Rio2, The Peanuts Movie, Ice Age: Collision Course, and Ferdinand. He also worked as a Character FX artist for Spies in Disguise, served as a founding member of the Blue Sky Training Department, as well as Environment Supervisor for various internal initiatives.

Ben Jones is a seasoned CG Supervisor with an efficiency itch to scratch. He is happiest when he is the dumbest person in the room (but maybe not by too much), and has been working in Houdini on and off for 11 years, though he wishes it had been more 'on'. After toiling in look development and lighitng for many years in feature animation, feature vfx, commercials and longform tv in another software package, Ben, in his current role as facility CG Technical Supervisor, is currently helping to transition Zoic studios a Houdini lighting pipeline. He is a former instructor, and occasional thesis advisor at the School of Visual Arts, NYC, and, like most Houdini users, is an evangelist for both the software, and for working smarter, not harder. When he's not working, he's probably in the kitchen perfecting his mise en place.

David Eschrich works as the Global Head of 3d at Zoic Studios. He has extensive experience across episodic, feature film and commercial work and was nominated for a VES Awards for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode. He’s previously served on the board for the VES NY including a two-year tenure as Co-Chair. A self-taught talent, he quietly built his own portfolio and left a career in finance to soon become a sought-after artist in the NYC VFX industry. Leveraging his background across various VFX pipeline steps including modeling, lighting and environment building, David approaches tasks from many angles but prefers to work procedurally when possible. He’s continuously looking for ways to improve workflows for his teams and enjoys going down technical and artistic rabbit holes to find solutions.

Casey Reuter is a 3D Asset and Environment artist and has been working in Visual Effects for broadcast for over a decade. He's currently at Zoic Studios in New York working in their Asset and Environment Departments and is always looking for ways to proceduralize the modeling process. He also teaches part time at SVA in their MFA program for digital art. Throughout his career he’s worked on Award winning commercials and TV shows working on ads for Nike, Game of Thrones, Netflix, Macy’s and many others as well as a handful of movies and TV shows including Avengers:Age of Ultron, Warrior, Moon Knight, and Sweet Tooth. Currently he’s working on episodic TV and using houdini as mainly a modeling tool to achieve higher levels of realism, creating modules to assist common modeling scenarios, and to craft stunning set pieces to really sell a set or environment.

Todd Bryant is an award-winning creative technologist who works across independent art installations, commercial activations, and academia as a Director of Production and Adjunct Professor in the Integrated Design & Media Program at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. He is globally recognized as a leading video artist, engineer, and educator with expertise in storytelling through mixed reality and experiential installations. His cutting-edge work and curricula include extensive projects in virtual production, motion capture, project mapping, and spatial media experiences. He has provided technical direction for projects that have been installed and exhibited at, among many other places, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Burning Man, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Celebrate Brooklyn as well as the immersive programs at leading film festivals like Cannes, Sundance, and Tribeca.

Monday Nov 7 | 2:30 PM EST
Expand Visuals from Houdini with Niagara

As an artist, I am interested in the unexpected beauty generated by unpredictable elements in virtual space. In this presentation, I will briefly cover how to build a basic environment in Unreal using digital assets and geometry from Houdini and Unreal lighting systems. I will mainly talk about how to import animated 3D characters into Unreal and creatively apply visual effects to the motion capture data using the Houdini point cache in the Unreal Niagara systems.

Yonghun Jung is a graduate student at New York University, and current XR Lab graduate assistant at the Integrated Design Media program. He is exploring unexpected beauty by using body movements as unpredictable elements in virtual space.

Monday Nov 7 | 3:30 PM EST
Virtual Production Education at New York University

This presentation will delve into how New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts is preparing the next generation of virtual production professionals. Merging the principles of storytelling with hands-on exploration of emerging technologies, graduate and undergraduate students from across Tisch are able to augment their creative skillset in order to enter a rapidly changing industry.

MaryAnn Talavera is a creative technologist, filmmaker, and polyglot with a love for storytelling and cross-cultural communication. She studied immersive media and virtual production in the Interactive Telecommunications Program(ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. At Tisch, MaryAnn works as the Associate Director of Recruitment in the Office of Special Programs and is the founder of Rolos Productions. In 2020 MaryAnn joined the NYC Media Lab x ASCAP’s Music and Design Challenge and in 2021 she received a HEAR US(Helping Elevate and Recapitalize Underrepresented Stories) Award for Root, which explores issues of race and representation within digital media.. She is also an Artist-in-Residence at Barnard College’s Movement Lab where she is working on ORIXA, a mixed reality celebration of the African diaspora.  MaryAnn is passionate about using immersive technology to highlight underrepresented communities and create projects that transcend borders.

Todd Bryant is an award-winning creative technologist who works across independent art installations, commercial activations, and academia as a Director of Production and Adjunct Professor in the Integrated Design & Media Program at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. He is globally recognized as a leading video artist, engineer, and educator with expertise in storytelling through mixed reality and experiential installations. His cutting-edge work and curricula include extensive projects in virtual production, motion capture, project mapping, and spatial media experiences.  He has provided technical direction for projects that have been installed and exhibited at, among many other places, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Burning Man, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Celebrate Brooklyn as well as the immersive programs at leading film festivals like Cannes, Sundance, and Tribeca. 

Monday Nov 7 | 4:30 PM EST
Virtual Production and the role of the
Virtual Art Department

A brief overview of what Virtual Production is, focusing on ICVFX.  From there, we will discuss in more detail what the Virtual Art Department is, who it is made up of, when it comes into the process, and what other roles/departments does it interact with. Then we’ll discuss different types of environments created by the VAD for virtual production and why each one may be chosen.

Monica Hinden has twenty years of experience as an Executive Producer for commercials and branded entertainment. She is known for shepherding impossible shoots to completion and has delivered countless high-end concepts for household-name clients including ABC/Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Target, Land Rover and Macys. At the beginning of the pandemic, Monica co-founded Final Pixel and took a leading role in the developing world of Virtual Production. For two years Monica has been delivering real-world projects shot in LED volumes for commercial clients.  She also built Final Pixel’s award-winning Virtual Art Department – one of the few VFX shops regularly turning out 3D environments optimized for real-time LED volume production. Monica lives on the East Coast and speaks regularly on the subject of producing for Virtual Production.

Monday Nov 7 | 5:30 PM EST
Metahumans and KineFX

Learn how to export MetaHuman assets from Epic’s Unreal Engine and then import them into Houdini for use within KineFX, Houdini’s rigging and animation framework and toolset. We will then retarget animation onto the MetaHuman asset and look at using Houdini’s Ragdolls to add more dynamic behavior. The results will then be exported back into Unreal for use in games/cinematics.

Michael Goldfarb is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. Prior to joining SideFX he worked in the Film/TV industry, primarily as a Character Technical Director.

Tuesday Nov 8 | 10:00 AM EST
Learning for Tomorrow

This workshop will look at the way real-time works along with procedural techniques and USD workflows. We will look at case studies that show how artists and studios are developing immersive 3D content, cross-platform experiences and imaginative ways to engage audiences. Lastly, we’ll look at the future skills that will lead to new techniques in the Film and Games industry. 

Julie Lottering works at Epic Games building a talent pool of real-time artists that will redefine production techniques in the Games and Film industry. Julie has 10+ years experience in visualization with a background that combines global education systems, neuroaesthetics and content creation tools such as Unreal Engine, Metahumans, Twinmotion and Houdini. At Epic she sets the vision and global strategy for education, including: secondary, post-secondary and upskilling industry professionals across M&E and Games.

Tuesday Nov 8 | 11:00 AM EST
Solaris/USD Workflows with Unreal

This presentation will showcase how to use the Component Builder workflow and the layout tools in Solaris to create a flexible scene using USD. We will then take the USD file into Unreal Engine to see how to non-destructively manipulate our scene, such as moving assets and changing USD variants.

Peter Arcara is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. He loves watching rocket launches and F1 races in his free time.

Tuesday Nov 8 | 12:00 PM EST
Industry & Education Discussion Panel: 
What the Film/TV Industry looks for in Students 

Join us for a discussion about what the industry is looking for in students. Learn what studios are looking for and how you can build a skill set that will get you a job.

MODERATOR | Debra Isaac is a visual artist, animator, and the founder of Houdini.School. She teaches at UCLA in the Design Media Arts Dept. and has over 10 years of experience teaching Houdini. She loves community building, hosts monthly Houdini Battles, and co-organizes The Los Angeles Houdini User group (LAHUG). She is passionate about scientific visualization, motion graphics, and emerging technologies. Her clients have included Intel, Mattel, and The UCLA Art|Sci Center.

David Eschrich works as the Global Head of 3d at Zoic Studios. He has extensive experience across episodic, feature film and commercial work and was nominated for a VES Awards for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode. He’s previously served on the board for the VES NY including a two-year tenure as Co-Chair. A self-taught talent, he quietly built his own portfolio and left a career in finance to soon become a sought-after artist in the NYC VFX industry. Leveraging his background across various VFX pipeline steps including modeling, lighting and environment building, David approaches tasks from many angles but prefers to work procedurally when possible. He’s continuously looking for ways to improve workflows for his teams and enjoys going down technical and artistic rabbit holes to find solutions.

Todd Bryant is an award-winning creative technologist who works across independent art installations, commercial activations, and academia as a Director of Production and Adjunct Professor in the Integrated Design & Media Program at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. He is globally recognized as a leading video artist, engineer, and educator with expertise in storytelling through mixed reality and experiential installations. His cutting-edge work and curricula include extensive projects in virtual production, motion capture, project mapping, and spatial media experiences. He has provided technical direction for projects that have been installed and exhibited at, among many other places, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Burning Man, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Celebrate Brooklyn as well as the immersive programs at leading film festivals like Cannes, Sundance, and Tribeca.

Georgios Cherouvim is an FX & CG lead and has been working in Visual Effects since 2005 on feature films, commercials and virtual reality experiences. He specializes in FX, dynamic simulations, procedural and behavioral animation systems, and over the years has also served as creative director and CG supervisor. He was staff at MPC London, MPC Vancouver, Framestore New York and has worked as a freelancer on several studios and agencies. In parallel to VFX, he maintains his own artistic practice in new media. His work has been featured in numerous festivals and venues worldwide, including Siggraph, Ars Electronica, South by Southwest, International Symposium on Electronic Art, Art Futura and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Georgios teaches Houdini at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is currently a member at the ONX studio, a mentor at the NewInc and has served as a jury member for the ÉCU film festival and the Irish Film & Television Academy.

Gregory Gangemi is a senior level CG artist, fine artist, and director. In 2007 he received his MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. With early experience as a lighter, he is a reliable and broad based generalist, with FX, animation, design and compositing experience. He has extensive experience working on-set as a Supervisor for commercial and episodic VFX, and has been involved in every aspect of the filmmaking process for commercial clients such as Sony, Toyota and Coca-Cola, as well as for television series such as Dickinson (Apple+) and Billions (Showtime). Gregory is currently Head of the 3D Department at FuseFX in NYC.

Elie Zananiri is an award-winning new media artist, designer, computer programmer, and educator. He specializes in large-scale installations, graphics programming, and virtual reality that redefines social boundaries in public spaces through immersive experiences and generative compositions. Elie has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, notably an Emmy Award for Zero Days VR (2018). Zananiri’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival (USA), Tribeca Film Festival (USA), Sónar (Spain), Venice Biennale (Italy), Plásmata Exhibition (Greece), Typ09 (Mexico), and Resonate (Serbia). Elie currently teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and develops media exhibits for the American Museum of Natural History. He is a regular contributor to open-source software projects, including the Processing and openFrameworks creative coding toolkits.

Winslow Porter is an award-winning director, producer and creative technologist specializing in virtual/augmented reality as well as large-scale immersive installations. Winslow formed the pioneering, new media studio the New Reality Company in 2016 with Milica Zec, creating the critically-acclaimed cinematic VR experiences Giant and Tree. He is currently a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, a seven-time mentor at the New Museum Incubator, a founding member of ONX Studio and an adjunct NYU Tisch professor. Winslow is also an artist in residence at the Smallhold Mushroom farm in Brooklyn, creating an immersive experience featuring the first volumetric time-lapse of mushrooms growing called Forager, featured at SIGGRAPH 2022 and Unreal Fest 2022 (forager.earth)

Tuesday Nov 8 | 1:00 PM EST
Data Sonification

A showcase of a series of personal projects where Houdini was used to visualize and sonify different datasets.

Georgios Cherouvim is an FX & CG lead and has been working in Visual Effects since 2005 on feature films, commercials and virtual reality experiences. He specializes in FX, dynamic simulations, procedural and behavioral animation systems, and over the years has also served as creative director and CG supervisor. He was staff at MPC London, MPC Vancouver, Framestore New York and has worked as a freelancer on several studios and agencies. In parallel to VFX, he maintains his own artistic practice in new media. His work has been featured in numerous festivals and venues worldwide, including Siggraph, Ars Electronica, South by Southwest, International Symposium on Electronic Art, Art Futura and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Georgios teaches Houdini at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is currently a member at the ONX studio, a mentor at the NewInc and has served as a jury member for the ÉCU film festival and the Irish Film & Television Academy.

Tuesday Nov 8 | 2:00 PM EST
Houdini/Unreal Art Battle

Welcome to Houdini/Unreal Art Battle, where 4 players compete live and show off their talent. Each battle’s theme will remain secret until we start, then each player has 45 minutes to create a work of art. You as our audience will choose the winner at the end. Join us!

MODERATOR | Debra Isaac is a visual artist, animator, and the founder of Houdini.School. She teaches at UCLA in the Design Media Arts Dept. and has over 10 years of experience teaching Houdini. She loves community building, hosts monthly Houdini Battles, and co-organizes The Los Angeles Houdini User group (LAHUG). She is passionate about scientific visualization, motion graphics, and emerging technologies. Her clients have included Intel, Mattel, and The UCLA Art|Sci Center.

COMMENTATOR | John Moncrief is the Education & Training Manager at SideFX. John has been teaching various visual effects software packages to creative industry professionals for more than 20 years. He lives for the rush of seeing students experience "light bulb" moments!

Felipe Amaya is a Houdini FX artist at FuseFX NYC. When he is not working on superpowers or blowing stuff up, he indulges his curiosity by experimenting with visual ideas through proceduralism and dynamics. Before working on film and television as a Houdini artist, Felipe worked as a GC generalist in commercial ads and as a graphic designer for multiple clients.

Mark Ingle is a Senior FX Artist at Artjail NYC and also an Instructor for Dynamics and Particle Systems for the MFA Computer Arts course at SVA. After completing his MA in Digital Effects at Bournemouth University in 2016, Mark moved out to NYC seeking out opportunities as an FX Artist. After working at Framestore, he freelanced for 5 years with studios in NYC and beyond. Recently he's been enjoying working a staff role at Artjail, using Houdini to produce many different FX for TV commercials.

Thursday Nov 10 | 10:00 AM CST
Education Program Update

SideFX supports students, artists and educators at every stage of their learning journey. Let's discover how to make the most of custom learning resources, license offerings and community connections to build Houdini talent at your school and studio.

John Moncrief is the Education & Training Manager at SideFX. John has been teaching various visual effects software packages to creative industry professionals for more than 20 years. He lives for the rush of seeing students experience "light bulb" moments! 

Peter Arcara is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. He loves watching rocket launches and F1 races in his free time.

Nicole Campbell has 10 years experience working with industry professionals to create top notch training content for Visual effects studios and schools. She’s native to Oklahoma, and aside from spending time with her friends and being outside in nature she enjoys doing anything with her 8 year old daughter.

Thursday Nov 10 | 11:00 AM CST
What's New from SideFX Labs

SideFX Labs is a a completely free, open-source toolset developed by SideFX technical artists, designed to meet real-time pipeline needs and improve the general quality of life for developers. Tools are released and updated continuously, so come see what we've been working on lately!

Danicka Oglesby is a technical artist on the Labs team at SideFX. She enjoys creating tools and systems that solve common problems, ease workflow strain, and generally improve the quality of life for artists. She has worked previously as a gameplay programmer on VR experiences, on improving and maintaining a Houdini city generator pipeline, and on developing editor tools for artists in Unreal and Unity. With a background in mathematics and a strong interest in art, she completed Texas A&M's graduate program in Visualization to combine and elevate her two interests into the field of computer graphics.

Thursday Nov 10 | 1:00 PM CST
Factors That Cause Frictions Amongst Minority Groups Pursuing Artistic Careers In Technology

Ongoing research on some of the barriers minority students face to pursue artistic careers in technology.

Hira T. Roberts (MFA Digital Art) is an Assistant Professor in the Digital Media Arts program at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU). She has an undergraduate degree in Architecture and worked as a game artist prior to her Master’s Degree from Louisiana State University. She has developed the interactive media, game design, and animation curriculum at PVAMU.

Thursday Nov 10 | 2:00 PM CST
Top 10 Reasons for Game Artists to Learn Houdini

While many young artists have heard about Houdini as a visual effects solution, they might ask themselves “How does this help me to make video games and why should I learn how to use it?” For game artists, there is a growing list of studios turning to Houdini to bring procedural solutions to game pipelines. Learn why a procedural approach can support tasks such as Environment Building, Level Design and Realtime FX

Robert Magee is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SideFX who has been working with Houdini for over 20 years. He has created lots of learning material and demos designed to help artists understand how going procedural with Houdini can benefit their work.

Thursday Nov 10 | 3:00 PM CST
Student Houdini achievement at TAMU in Visualization

Joint presentation with other Viz kids covering our use of Houdini for this year's summer industry course. I'm personally planning to discuss my creative process and how I used Houdini to build a layered groom over the course of 10 weeks. 

Mayet Andreassen is both an artist and educator whose core philosophy centers on promoting artistic and creative excellence in her students and herself. She earned her M.F.A. in Film and Animation from The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and her B.F.A in 2D Animation and Illustration from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Mayet is currently working as the Associate Program Director of the B.S. in Visualization and as a full-time Instructional Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University in the School of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. Previously she has worked as a part-time instructor at The HOFT Institute Game Lab, as an adjunct at UT in the AET Department, as a part-time instructor at Gemini School of Visual Arts, and as a full-time faculty member at the Art Institute of Austin in the Media Arts & Animation, and Game Art & Design programs. Other teaching includes Gameworlds summer camp and after-school program, for children ages 8 – 17. Currently and, in the past, Mayet has led and served on various committees. She currently serves on two non-profit Boards and teaches advanced 3D production classes in animation and games. Mayet’s previous work experience is in the games industry, working as an artist at 2K Sports/Visual Concepts Entertainment in Novato, CA., where she modeled, textured and animated interactive menus and UI using 3D software. Other games experience includes contract work for Zynga Games and freelance design and illustration."

Julia Boisvert is a 23-year old senior Visualization student at Texas A&M with interests in look and visual development. Though she has an artistic background, she is currently interested in exploring more of the technical side of look development and just recently started using Houdini while branching into grooming for the first time this past summer. She hopes to continue finding ways to integrate it into her creative journey as she moves forward after being introduced to its immense capabilities. 

Izzy Rollo is a graduate student pursuing her M.S. in Visualization at Texas A&M University. In addition to her studies, she is doing graduate research at Starlab, which is the motion capture facility at the university. During her time in school, she has primarily used Houdini for VFX in animation. Other interests of hers include lighting for animation, programming for games, and creating interactive VR experiences using motion capture.

Alyssa Curran is a Visualization graduate student at Texas A&M University with an interest in surfacing/look development. She was the lead surfacing artist on the 3D animation short, Moonstruck, created for the Texas A&M Summer Industry Course. Her primary responsibility on the short was creating a short-fur groom for the wolf character. Her other roles included concept art, prop modeling, and prop surfacing.

Emma Krilowicz is a senior Visualization major at Texas A&M University. Having both scientific and artistic interests, her focus lies in Look Development which includes an array of skills in surfacing, grooming, and procedural geometry creation. At Texas A&M University, she currently works at the LIVE Lab as a 3D artist and as a peer teacher for the Visualization school. This past summer, she had the opportunity to participate in Texas A&M's Summer Industry Course, where she took on the Look Development and Grooming lead roles for Forsaken. This experience offered her insight into how Houdini intersects with Look Development, and she looks forward to exploring this intersection during the remainder of her senior year. She hopes to enter the animation film industry as a Look Development artist, utilizing various workflows to achieve her goals.

Thursday Nov 10 | 4:00 PM CST
Solaris/USD Workflows with Unreal

This presentation will showcase how to use the Component Builder workflow and the layout tools in Solaris to create a flexible scene using USD. We will then take the USD file into Unreal Engine to see how to non-destructively manipulate our scene, such as moving assets and changing USD variants.

Peter Arcara is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. He loves watching rocket launches and F1 races in his free time. 

Friday Nov 11 | 10:00 AM CST
Epic Games

This workshop will look at the way real-time works along with procedural techniques and USD workflows. We will look at case studies that show how artists and studios are developing immersive 3D content, cross-platform experiences and imaginative ways to engage audiences. Lastly, we’ll look at the future skills that will lead to new techniques in the Film and Games industry.

James Hill recently started as a technical artist at Epic Games working with the Education Team to design training and resources to grow real-time skills. He has been working with Unreal Engine for 4 years creating interactive demos and games and showing people how to make their own ideas into reality.

Friday Nov 11 | 11:00 AM CST
Industry & Education Discussion Panel:
What the Gamedev Industry looks for in Students 

Join us for a discussion about what the industry is looking for in students. Learn what studios are looking for and how you can build a skill set that will get you a job.

MODERATOR | Debra Isaac is a visual artist, animator, and the founder of Houdini.School. She teaches at UCLA in the Design Media Arts Dept. and has over 10 years of experience teaching Houdini. She loves community building, hosts monthly Houdini Battles, and co-organizes The Los Angeles Houdini User group (LAHUG). She is passionate about scientific visualization, motion graphics, and emerging technologies. Her clients have included Intel, Mattel, and The UCLA Art|Sci Center.

Nelson Lim is a CG Artist, Technologist, husband and father of 2 young boys based in Dallas Texas. He is also an Associate Professor at The School of Arts, Humanities and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas where he teaches Houdini, VFX, Real-time Engines and Software Development. His experiences include Industrial Light & Magic and Brazen Animation, where he served various roles in FX technical direction, software development, leading and supervision. Some projects he was privileged to be involved in include Fortnite, League of Legends, Warcraft, Pacific Rim, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Battleship and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Nelson runs a YouTube channel at www.nelsonlim.com/youtube and The Effective Community for Aspiring FX artists and TDs at www.nelsonlim.com/effective. When he isn’t busy with work, you might find him creating memorable experiences for his family and in the garden trying to grow things.

Bailey Currie is a Senior Technical Artist developing content for holographic projections at IKIN in Austin. Seven years ago, she was introduced to Houdini in grad school at The Viz Lab at Texas A&M and soon fell in love with the powerful and flexible FX and procedural modeling tool. After a brief contract with Rooster Teeth creating FX for anime's, RWBY and gen:Lock, Bailey began her 'serious games' career at Cubic, a leading provider of virtual defense training solutions. There she developed a city building pipeline in Houdini using terrain elevation data and data acquired from Open Street Map (OSM). Bailey is obsessed with defining rules for complex systems and transforming mind-numbing, repetitive tasks into simple parameters and button clicks for herself and other lazy artists. Her passion for tool building has led her to introduce Houdini Engine for Unity to IKIN to scale up the production of volumetric content for holograms. 

Monica Garza is a skilled Technical Artist at Dimensional Ink Games specializing in Houdini and problem solving. Her career began at CUBIC Intific working on a DARPA funded military game that required large amounts of data to be parsed and content to be created from that data. Her experience includes creating content pipelines from the ground up, restructuring tools, and maximizing efficiency in workflows. She currently assists content artists at Dimensional Ink by analyzing and upgrading their current tools and processes. Her hobbies include traditional and digital painting and video games.

Friday Nov 11 | 1:00 PM CST
REEL Review

Bring your demo reel and get feedback from industry experts. Learn how well your work stacks up and what you can do to improve your work before you go out job searching.

MODERATOR | Debra Isaac is a visual artist, animator, and the founder of Houdini.School. She teaches at UCLA in the Design Media Arts Dept. and has over 10 years of experience teaching Houdini. She loves community building, hosts monthly Houdini Battles, and co-organizes The Los Angeles Houdini User group (LAHUG). She is passionate about scientific visualization, motion graphics, and emerging technologies. Her clients have included Intel, Mattel, and The UCLA Art|Sci Center.

Nelson Lim is a CG Artist, Technologist, husband and father of 2 young boys based in Dallas Texas. He is also an Associate Professor at The School of Arts, Humanities and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas where he teaches Houdini, VFX, Real-time Engines and Software Development. His experiences include Industrial Light & Magic and Brazen Animation, where he served various roles in FX technical direction, software development, leading and supervision. Some projects he was privileged to be involved in include Fortnite, League of Legends, Warcraft, Pacific Rim, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Battleship and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Nelson runs a YouTube channel at www.nelsonlim.com/youtube and The Effective Community for Aspiring FX artists and TDs at www.nelsonlim.com/effective. When he isn’t busy with work, you might find him creating memorable experiences for his family and in the garden trying to grow things.

Danicka Oglesby is a technical artist on the Labs team at SideFX. She enjoys creating tools and systems that solve common problems, ease workflow strain, and generally improve the quality of life for artists. She has worked previously as a gameplay programmer on VR experiences, on improving and maintaining a Houdini city generator pipeline, and on developing editor tools for artists in Unreal and Unity. With a background in mathematics and a strong interest in art, she completed Texas A&M's graduate program in Visualization to combine and elevate her two interests into the field of computer graphics.

Gianvito Serra is a Principal Technical Art Director at Electronic arts focused in Procedural content creation. Gianvito graduated from Ringling College of Art in 2001 with a BFA in computer animation, and joined EA shortly after. He worked as a character and world artists for several years before discovering his passion for procedural content creation in 2010, and transitioning to technical art. To help share his passion for art and procedural with emerging students, Gianvito taught a Virtual Environments course at Texas A&M's Department of Architecture and Visualization for two semesters in addition to his current role at EA. Gianvito's considers his experience working as an artists and with students as one of his biggest assets in being an effective Technical Art director

Friday Nov 11 | 2:00 PM CST
Metahumans and KineFX

Learn how to export MetaHuman assets from Epic’s Unreal Engine and then import them into Houdini for use within KineFX, Houdini’s rigging and animation framework and toolset. We will then retarget animation onto the MetaHuman asset and look at using Houdini’s Ragdolls to add more dynamic behavior. The results will then be exported back into Unreal for use in games/cinematics.

Michael Goldfarb is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. Prior to joining SideFX he worked in the Film/TV industry, primarily as a Character Technical Director.

Friday Nov 11 | 3:00 PM CST
Houdini/Unreal Art Battle 

Welcome to Houdini/Unreal Art Battle, where 4 players compete live and show off their talent. Each battle’s theme will remain secret until we start, then each player has 45 minutes to create a work of art. You as our audience will choose the winner at the end. Join us!

Debra Isaac is a visual artist, animator, and the founder of Houdini.School. She teaches at UCLA in the Design Media Arts Dept. and has over 10 years of experience teaching Houdini. She loves community building, hosts monthly Houdini Battles, and co-organizes The Los Angeles Houdini User group (LAHUG). She is passionate about scientific visualization, motion graphics, and emerging technologies. Her clients have included Intel, Mattel, and The UCLA Art|Sci Center.

COMMENTATOR | Nelson Lim is a CG Artist, Technologist, husband and father of 2 young boys based in Dallas Texas. He is also an Associate Professor at The School of Arts, Humanities and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas where he teaches Houdini, VFX, Real-time Engines and Software Development. His experiences include Industrial Light & Magic and Brazen Animation, where he served various roles in FX technical direction, software development, leading and supervision. Some projects he was privileged to be involved in include Fortnite, League of Legends, Warcraft, Pacific Rim, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Battleship and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Nelson runs a YouTube channel at www.nelsonlim.com/youtube and The Effective Community for Aspiring FX artists and TDs at www.nelsonlim.com/effective. When he isn’t busy with work, you might find him creating memorable experiences for his family and in the garden trying to grow things.

Friday 1:00 AM MDT
Education Program Update

SideFX supports students, artists and educators at every stage of their learning journey. Let's discover how to make the most of custom learning resources, license offerings and community connections to build Houdini talent at your school and studio.

John Moncrief is the Education & Training Manager at SideFX. John has been teaching various visual effects software packages to creative industry professionals for more than 20 years. He lives for the rush of seeing students experience "light bulb" moments! 

Peter Arcara is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. He loves watching rocket launches and F1 races in his free time.

Friday 2:00 AM MDT
Creating Hyper-Reality using Unreal Engine

Deep dive into how The VOID is utilizing the Unreal Engine to create and define a new form of hyper-reality location based entertainment. Learn how traditional and emerging technology practices influence the entire guest experience.

Dana Ware is an international award-winning, Chicana director who specializes in virtual reality and augmented reality. She has a master's degree in Entertainment Arts and Engineering - Game Development from the University of Utah. As well as, an MFA in Film and New Media. In 2019, Dana became a Creative Director at The VOID where she helped to explore the future of VR storytelling and directing. Dana’s work includes a hyper-reality TV series, at-home VR experiences, LBE VR, simulator rides, and AR projects. She specializes in developing magical experiences by combining virtual and physical realities into hyper-reality.

Friday 3:00 AM MDT
Building a Solaris USD Pipeline for Small Studios

Using Houdini’s LOPs tools, we developed a USD pipeline that allowed our production to work seamlessly across Houdini, Unreal, and Maya. With these tools, we were able to build our pipeline in just months and to adapt it on the fly to the needs of our production. 

Zachary Wood is a BYU animation major from North Salt Lake, Utah. Throughout his undergrautate degree, he has worked as a generalist creating short animations for various campus classes, researching the implementation of real time rendering into film pipelines, and building USD centric pipelines into BYU Animation’s capstone projects. Aside from pipeline research and implementation, Zach loves to create in many aspects of film and game production from lookdev, modeling, and shading to FX and lighting. He worked as an environment artist on BYU’s short, Heir, as well as an FX artist on BYU’s short, Cenote. He hopes to work in the film or game industry solving technical problems and creating procedural workflows for environment, character, and pipeline.

Anna Hales is a senior at BYU from Midland, Michigan, majoring in animation. At BYU Anna has spent many work hours researching realtime rendering implementation into film pipelines. She was a main force in building the backbone pipeline that has become BYU’s Unreal implementation in film and pre-visualization. Excelling in look development and shading, Anna has headed many explorations into shading workflows and stylization in Unreal Engine and Renderman for BYU’s capstone projects. She enjoys finding procedural solutions to interesting problems in animated film production, and hopes to work in the film industry as a technical director.

Friday 4:00 AM MDT
SideFX Unreal Engine Tools Update

TBD.

Peter Arcara is a Training Lead at SideFX. He creates courses for the Houdini Insight learning platform, consults with instructors about curriculum, and supports the Houdini Educator Community. He loves watching rocket launches and F1 races in his free time.