Université du Québec en Abitibi-Temiscamingue (UQAT)

Our Introductory Houdini & Compositing course takes young artists into their first steps in the industry of VFX. We reshaped the course to introduce Houdini as the application of choice. We start by a brief differentiation between 3D application and work our way to a small initiation on basic effects and let the magic begins. We show its strength and how it can advantage an artist in production. Based in Montreal, UQAT Campus provides various Bachelor Degree programs (one in in Video games ( Art, Design or Integration) and one in 3D creation which focuses on CG movies and visual effects from modeling to compositing and vfx).

We then take a step further by introducing the Interface with some primitive modeling. At this stage, the students have already acquired a strong idea of the network graph, dependencies, and nesting nodes. In the next classes, we go further by teaching them to use Houdini as a modeling tool, procedurally and non-procedurally, so that Houdini becomes a go-to application, minimizing the back and forth with other DCC. We evolve the same way with texturing, shading, lighting, rendering & FX.

Usually, a three-hour course is split in half, where the first part is a lecture with a live demonstration. The students can follow by replicating the teacher's example. The second half represents practice time and applying the learned knowledge on their project with the support of the teachers. In a similar introductory class, environment design, we push the student to use Houdini as a procedural tool to generate vegetation, landscapes, etc.