Intro to Houdini for FX Artists

This workshop has been completely updated with an entire new project that involves a building destruction and lots of particle based, smoke, pyro and rbd FX.

This new content is going to be used as an example to show students how the provided knowledge can be used to create a finished fx shot.

This new content will also be used to provide updates to everything Houdini 18 has to offer.

Due to this update and extra content the workshop is now much bigger and denser, approximately 14 weeks packed onto 10 weeks and we will provide guiding video on how to work through the content effectively.

The goal of this workshop is to get someone who never used Houdini before to become comfortable with the application and it’s various layers as-well producing high quality FX.

Notes: we are still working on the content and we may add or remove few topics depending on what we think is best for the student.

The promo trailer uses a lot of nuke compositing and in this workflow we will show a simple composite of everything, a more advanced/dedicate nuke workshop will cover compositing these types of shots/fx in more details.

Description:

This course is designed for people who have a good understanding of CG and interested in gaining a full understanding of Houdini and how to properly utilize it’s capacity to create particles FX, water simulation, destruction and volume simulation.The course will also cover in depth how to render the various FX elements and how to composite them using Houdini COPs

We will be creating a variety of FX and with each topic we will cover a specific part of Houdini and learn how to work with a handful of nodes

We will have an interior scene to start with where we will design various particle while learning how create complex visuals and understand how particle simulation works

We will then continue and start choreographing the destruction of this environment and learn how to fracture geometry and use Bullets

Once we destroy our environment we will create a huge flooding to understand and learn how water simulation works in Houdini

Then we will learn how to use volume and smoke simulation to create various smoke based FX to enhance what we’ve created in week 2

We will learn how to shade and render a variety of FX, including particles, volumes and water using mantra

After all the fx creation and rendering we will learn how to composite all these passes using Houdini COPs.

By the end of the 8th week the student should acquired a very deep understanding of how Houdini works and be able to create and render Particles FX, water simulation, destruction.

Disclaimer:

This workshop contains lot more information and the weekly breakdown is just the highlights.

Assignments and weekly lecture are very very demanding and can be challenging to new Houdini comers.

It is required that the student have a very good CG background in shading and lighting.

WEEK1 –

Intro to proceduralism and Houdini’s interface

Maya vs Max vs Houdini, transition and differences

Intro to Houdini contexts

Intro to vex and pointvops

How to get the most out of the workshop

A deeper look at the various fx to be created and how to plan for the various assignment

Hardware requirement

NEW: Houdini 18, new features and what we should focus on

NEW: A look at the new FX Building project.

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WEEK2 —

Intro to pops

An introduction to Designing FX

Timing & Layering

Create a simple procedural system that uses path finding to create various particles streams

Create various FX elements using POPs

Particles Caching and optimization

NEW: FX Energy design and prototyping the look

NEW: Simulation setup

NEW: Guiding particles and creating intelligent paths and Colliders

NEW: Shockwave design, approach and execution

WEEK3 —

Intro to Houdini volumes and vdb manipulation.

Intro to Dops and smoke solver

Create various smoke elements to enhance all the particles FX created week 2

Volume caching and optimization

NEW: Creating magical explosion

NEW: Adding more FX layers to the shockwave

NEW: Using smoke simulation to enhance particle simulation

WEEK4 —-

Intro to mantra

Intro to shading in mantra

Shading all the particles FX previously created

Rendering the environment and setting up all the passes need to render our particles FX

Intro to cops in Houdini

NEW: Buildings, streets and environment rendering

NEW: Initial particle rendering

NEW: Introduction To Compositing

WEEK5 —–

Intro to Bullets and constraints

Fracturing using voronoi and boolean

What is convex decomposition

Edge displacement and high-res interior

Create the constraint

Simulate the rbd

Caching the rbd and optimisation

Setup a workflow for using lowres/higer geometry for simulation vs rendering

NEW: Houdini 16/17 and 18 and how to transition

NEW: When to use sop level solvers vs dop level solvers

NEW: Creating the building destruction setup

NEW: Building destruction setup and tweaking

WEEK6 ——

Create various debris systems using particles and bullets.

Create smoke trail simulation using pops and smoke solver

Create a smoke sim to use as an air field for particle advection.

NEW: Adding debris trails for buildings to enhance the overall visual

WEEK7 NEW——

NEW: Rendering all the additional elements needed

NEW: Balancing and tweaking.

NEW: Putting everything together

WEEK8 ——

Intro to flipfluids in Houdini

Prepping the geometry for flip fluids and collision

Create Custom forces to enhance the flip fluid sim

Create the Highres sim

Meshing in Houdini

Intro to whitewater in Houdini

Create whitewater source

Create a highres foam simulation including, bubbles, spray and foam.

NEW: Houdini 18 workflow/changes and how to transitio