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TOTAL DURATION: 1h 46m 45s

PDG, or procedural dependency graph, is an architecture in Houdini designed to distribute tasks and manage dependencies to better scale, automate, and analyze content pipelines.

In this course, you will learn how to build these graphs within Houdini’s TOP context. You will learn how to iterate designs, manage tasks, and utilize all the resources on your machine or farm. By the end of this course, you will understand the fundamentals of working in TOPs, allowing you to begin building pipelines for individual, or team environments.

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1 | Course Introduction [0:30]
This video is a quick introduction of what to expect from this course, as well as showing some previews of some concepts in the later chapters.
2 | PDG Overview [4:42]
Before building your first TOP network, learn what PDG is, and what issues it aims to resolve. This will help you understand PDG fundamentals such as task execution and task dependencies.
3 | Terminology [4:25]
In this video, you learn more specific terminology used within TOPs. Learn what work items and schedulers are, as well the relationship between them. You will also learn about work item states and what they represent.
4 | Scheduler [3:58]
The scheduler manages the resources on our machine or farm when cooking work items. Explore some considerations when working with schedulers to ensure your networks run as efficiently as possible.
5 | Work Items [5:26]
The signature green dots on TOP nodes represent work items. Each work item gives information on the status of the task being performed. Learn about work item generation, differences between static and dynamic work items, and how to visualize them in TOP nodes.
6 | Working in TOPs [12:09]
In this video, explore the TOPs interface and learn how to generate work items. You will then learn how to generate, cook, and visualize work items.
7 | City Builder Walkthrough [6:02]
This video is a quick walkthrough of the hip file provided with the course. Here, you start off exploring the final montage that you can expect by the end of the course. You will then learn about important aspects of the hip file and what considerations to take before moving into TOPs.
8 | Creating Wedges [8:36]
Start off by creating work items using the Wedge TOP to represent the various city variations/wedges that you will generate. You can read attributes from TOPs into the Houdini scene to generate variations on the geometry.
9 | ROP Geometry Output [4:20]
To cache geometry using TOPs, you can use the ROP geometry output to save the results of a node to disk. You can utilize work item attributes to ensure that each wedge is saved to a unique path.
10 | Rendering in TOPs [11:22]
Learn how to use Rop Fetch TOPs to execute ROPs. Use OpenGL ROPs to achieve fast renders to visualize the city wedges. Similar to the ROP Geometry Output, you need to ensure unique paths for each of the wedges.
11 | File Copy [8:49]
Since you have two separate camera angles, you can edit the frame values for one of those sequences to create 1 continuous sequence. You can use File Copy to rename and rearrange files procedurally after rendering them.
12 | Attribute Create [3:12]
When you rearrange files, some attributes can be out of date. Learn how to use Attribute Create to update attributes. When working with large amounts of work items, it is important to stay organized and consistent in this way.
13 | Overlay Text [5:32]
We can add text to our images to display what parameter values are used when generating that specific variation. Here, our work items have inherited attributes from the Wedge nodes that represent these parameter values. Using Overlay Text, we can execute a COP network to add the text.
14 | Mosaic [7:19]
To create a mosaic, we need all images of the same frame to be rendered together on one image. We can use partition nodes to create dependencies between work items. This way, one image can be rendered as soon as all the images of that frame are ready and available.
15 | Encode Video [3:18]
After our mosaics are rendered, we can use FFMPEG to render a video.
16 | Working with TOP Networks [7:08]
In this video, you will explore some common pitfalls and considerations when working with TOP Networks as a whole.
17 | Scheduler Override [2:40]
Learn how to fine tune how schedulers schedule work items by adding overrides. This is particularly useful on nodes that may be computationally heavy.
18 | Pyro Bonfire Scene Demo [7:17]
This video is a walkthrough of a scene that wedges a bonfire simulation.

COMMENTS

  • __feisar__ 2 years, 3 months ago  | 

    Outstanding training. The most important information for understand and starting out wrapped into one video. Great Job, Daniel!
    More on TOPs would be highly appreciated.

    • Njordy 2 years, 2 months ago  | 

      Very nice to start with, thank you :)

      • TwinSnakes007 2 years, 2 months ago  | 

        Wow - this is some very informative content. Awesome job SideFX!

        • AlfredoSMC 2 years, 2 months ago  | 

          In summary, I will guide myself to answer that I understood something beautiful.
          This is a huge geant Polyreduce or fuse, I'm not referring to pixels, but to reduce work time. if so it's wonderful.
          I liked it and I will try to learn, thanks !

          • Hugo Depping 2 years, 1 month ago  | 

            Thanks for this awesome tutorial series!

            • Trogleth 2 years, 1 month ago  | 

              Is there a way to send the City Builder results into Unreal Engine 5? And are you able to setup materials/UVs for the buildings? I apologize if these are bad questions but this looks like a tutorial that is heading for what I want to do but I am not sure.

              • Trogleth 2 years, 1 month ago  | 

                Also is there a way to export the buildings or pieces and texture them in Substance Painter?

              • HarrryHoudini 2 years ago  | 

                Having some trouble installing imagemagick on macOS. I'm trying to do it through the 19.5 houdini.env file by putting:

                PDG_IMAGEMAGICK = "/Users/myusername/Downloads/ImageMagick-7.0-1.10/bin/magick"

                I forced macOS to open the magick bin file but the imagemagick node in the tutorial is failing to cook?

                Also, the last item on the imagemagic node, should I set the imagemagic binary to "PDG_IMAGEMAGICK" like in the houdini.env file?

                Is this the right way to install imagemagick on macOS?

                • housinifx 1 year, 3 months ago  | 

                  Very good introduction to task operators. As always side fx did a great job!

                  • 842f31742b294d69 12 months ago  | 

                    When using overlaytext top node, it opens a Houdini instance for each work item among all 1440 work items, which is very efficient. Can it open one instance for one sequence and render the entire frame range instead?

                    • geetee2323 3 weeks, 6 days ago  | 

                      The base scene weighs a ton my laptop, would have been nice to learn on a less heavy cooking scene, wouldn't normally winge but its surprising considering what is the norm with SideFX help/tutorial scenes i.e lean and considerate.

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