DAYDREAMER PRODUCTION PIPELINE: DYNAMICS

The video above is an animated short we produced for SIGGRAPH 2015.  We also used it as a teaching tool, breaking down each portion of the pipeline in detail and explaining the process as our assets moved through production. In the tutorials for the Houdini portion of the pipeline, we’ll take a look at the visual effects elements created for the project.  

Throughout the tutorial, we’ll look at how to identify what’s needed from the FX department by breaking down the animatic. We'll learn how to build an effective visual effects pipeline that fits the project's needs, and how to get elements in and out of various software packages. 

We'll discuss using optimized workflows for Houdini DOPs production, geometry caching workflows, and how to create rendered elements for use in NUKE. This tutorial doesn’t go step-by-step through all of the assets we used, but it’s intended to provide you with an insight to the overall concepts, production methodology and workflow. 

Before beginning this tutorial, we recommend you have a familiarity with the general concepts of Houdini's dynamics context, surface operators, and rendering workflow. By the end of this Houdini training, you’ll have an understanding of how all of the FX were created for the Daydreamer production pipeline series.