#houdini engine

How the Water in Luca Pushed Pixar Into a New Age of Animation

As the story of a young ‘sea monster’ boy who comes of age in a seaside town on the Italian Riveira in the 1950s, water is naturally everywhere in Luca. It creates the home for Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay, from Room) and his people. But it’s also something to be feared, for Luca’s shapeshifting amphibian species turns from ‘sea monster’ to human when they leave the sea. Water is the…

Houdini Tutorial Procedural Level Design in Unreal Engine 4

Learn how to create the automatic level generation plugin with powerful procedural tools in Houdini for Unreal Engine 4.

More procedural rock experiments with Houdini.

Nodes in graph;

– Box / Cube : We start with a simple default cube mesh,  

– UV projection: Just like in your DCC software, a way to create your UV coordinates. But in Houdini it is recorded as a node. So you can easiliy change the settings, move, or delete the node.

– Subdivide: Apply a subdivision on the cube mesh.

– Attribvop: Network to modify geometry attributes : The noises are added to displace the mesh. After some small experiments I discovered that the following combination of noises works great for rockshapes: worleyNoise ( main shape ) + turboNoise + VeronoNoise.

Python node:

This node is responsible for two things:

1) Lock/Disable the settings when the subdivision value is greater than 5. ( Similar to Substance you have to take into account that all of your operations are realtime. So when you want to change a lot of values on a high poly mesh, your tool might get a bit slow. ) . Just lower the subdivision value to edit again.

2) Saves all the values to a presetRock.txt file. Next step would be to load the preset and set all the new values. I'm currently working on that.

To do:

-  I think I can make the control even better and add some kind of handles or curves that the artist can use to 'push' and 'pull' the rockshape

- testing houdini baker

Last week, I was humbled to have been invited by Fran Zandonella, Sr. Pipeline TD, & Dane Bettis, Pipeline TD at Framestore, to present my cinematography research with the SmartVCS at Framestore's LA office to members of the Los Angeles Animation & Visual Effects Pipeline Developers User Group. I had the opportunity to meet with Fran and Dane at SIGGRAPH 2013 where they expressed interest in having me speak (and hopefully inspire) some pipeline professionals in the area. As an addition to my research presentation, I was also able to outline some of the work I am doing at SideFX with the Houdini Engine as well as go into more technical detail on the construction of my system.

It was a nice gathering of industry minds at the facility's screening room (~30 individuals as well as a live online broadcast stream) where I was able to set up a demo station for hands-on walkthroughs after the talk. Honestly, it is always great to hear feedback and genuine interest by such accomplished professionals and talk about our respective visions for the future of the industry. We exist at a crossroads in this industry between game development and film production where tools, like this, are being developed to blur the lines between the two media, enabling new & dynamic production pipelines. 

This week, I will begin exploring the development of a new cinematic tool for third-person action/adventure-style games that will leverage the Houdini Engine and Unity. I will also be focussing on the launch of Houdini 13 next week as well as SideFX's move to our new gorgeous facility at the Santa Monica Business Park.