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Wednesday June 19 | 9:30 AM CEST
Pillow Talk 

If you ever wondered about how easy it is, to make a soft pillow, here you will get such fulfilment of it. We will be making a comfy pillow! - yes, using some of the new tools in Houdini 20.5. These include the wrinkle deformer, planar inflate, sculpt brushes, and then adding some texture details in COPs. We will also look at some convenient additions in Solaris, particularly the Quick Surface Material LOP, where we can cheaply alter pre-made assets to fit our visual needs. There will also be a few other highlights bundled into this, so drop by and have a watch! 

Fianna Wong is Technical Marketing Lead at SideFX and when in the office, can be heard clearly from the other end of the floorspace. She prefers blue switch, but sometimes red for quieter times.

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Wednesday June 19 | 10:10 AM CEST
Every Node, Every Where, all in LOPS 

Houdini 20.5 offers artists great new tools and workflows to maintain their creative momentum in Solaris and Karma. From the power of using the Stage Manager in the viewport, to the ease of creating and manipulating materials, to spawning cloned renders directly from LOP nodes, this release vastly reduces the need to jump between contexts as they work on different tasks. We will explore these topics, connections between Solaris and Copernicus, and more.

Rob Pieké is a Senior Software developer, working on Solaris for the last three years. Prior to SideFX, he spent 15 years in the R&D teams of VFX studios developing in-house technologies and improving production workflows, with a soft focus on lighting and rendering. Rob has been passionate about computer graphics from a young age, and continually strives to ensure that technology is always a helper and never a hindrance to creativity.

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Wednesday June 19 | 10:50 AM CEST
Bird Plumage Grooming  

Learn about all the stages required to groom a bird. Creating plumage for the Houdini 20.5 toucan will give us the chance to explore this complete workflow.

Andriy Bilichenko is a visual artist, owning both the latest digital technologies and methods of traditional oil painting and drawing. He is also the honorary Chairman of the defunct Order of Houdini Fighters. 

You can see more of his work on his website:
www.bilichenko.fr

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Thursday June 13 | 1:00 PM CEST
Why Animators will Love Houdini!    

We will show how we go from a model to final rig with animation in our short film in progress "Turbulence", using KineFX with Apex. Having an animation background in Maya, will talk about how to easily adjust to the workflow of Houdini and the advantages of a procedural workflow.

Magnus Møller is a Creative Director, Rigger and Co-Founder of the Danish studio Tumblehead. He has a passion for quirky characters and cartoony animation. Maya user for 14 years, Houdini user for 7 years. Dreams of making full animation productions entirely in Houdini! 

Jesper Andkjær is the spear of animation and design at Tumblehead. He has many years of experience with animating in Maya. This past year he has been diving into Houdini animation tools and explored some of the many use cases. He also is Denmarks most renowned courtroom sketch artist.

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Wednesday June 19 | 2:10 PM CEST
Character Animation Workflow   

Explore the new features, tools and workflows for animating characters in Houdini 20.5. Learn about the new transient constraints, animation layers, motion paths and other features and improvements for creating character animation in Houdini.

Warren Leathem is a Senior Animator on the character team at SideFX. Prior to joining SideFX in 2021, he spent over 20 years as an Animator, Animation Lead and Animation Supervisor in the film and TV industry, focused almost entirely on character animation. Having worked at studios such as MPC, Weta Digital, and Animal Logic, he brings that experience to focus not only on animators doing amazing work, but also on how animation fits into the overall production environment and workflows.

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Wednesday June 19 | 2:50 PM CEST
Procedural Character Rigging Techniques in APEX    

Take a deep dive into the process of character rigging  in APEX. It will demonstrate workflows using guide skeletons and tags. We will start building rigs with  with preshipped tools. Focusing on tool creation we will extend those ones with custom rig components created on the fly using APEX Script.

Esther Trilsch is a Senior Character TD at SideFX. She started her career as a character TD apprentice at Walt Disney Animation Studios working on Zootopia, and worked at RiseFX as a Character Supervisor and Pipeline TD. Combining her focus for both the creative side of anatomy and deformation, as well as the technical side of RnD, she found her sweet spot in the building of innovative structures and tools for character workflows.

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Wednesday June 19 | 4:25 PM CEST
Baking Recipes

In Houdini 20.5, parameters and nodes can be represented as JSON-compatible dictionaries through the HOM API. Recipes are an extension over this functionality to create and manage node presets, per-node shelves and tab menu entries. 

Attila Torok is a London based FX TD working for SideFX. He started out as a SideFX intern then went on to work for Double Negative on projects like The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Godzilla. Attila then spent 4 years at ILM, where he worked on movies like Doctor Strange, Avengers: Infinity War, Ready Player One, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, he was building and maintaining tools for particle simulations, deformable and tearable rigid body simulations and for Pyro FX used throughout the compan

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Wednesday June 19 | 5:20 PM CEST
Don't Run from COPs     

Houdini's COP context has been rearchitected into Copernicus in Houdini 20.5! With Copernicus, you will have many new features and one of the big one is the ability to author procedural textures. This presentation will focus on that aspect, demonstrating its capabilities and techniques through a couple of detailed examples.

Nikola Damjanov is a generalist 3D artist with 15 years of experience. He transitioned from engineering to interactive media early in his career. Starting with creating models, animations, and VFX for music videos and movies, he later delved into architectural and product visualization, graphics, web design, and interactive art installations. He found his passion as a game artist, continuously honing his skills by exploring new tools and staying updated on tech innovations. Currently working as a lead game artist at Nordeus, Nikola is dedicated to shaping the company culture through mentoring, hiring, and active involvement in game-art communities. He enjoys sharing knowledge and learning from others in the industry.