Realtime VFX for Games: Houdini ILLUME Webinar

Towards the end of 2016 I was fortunate enough to share a lot of the work we did on Gears of War 4 using Houdini through a webinar organized by SideFX. At just under 2 hours there's a lot of info crammed in. I wanted to cover as much as possible at a higher level because I think the concepts can be applied more broadly. I also dive in and show some specific setups.

In the video I cover:

  • Transitioning from Film to Video Games as a Houdini Artist
  • Differences between real-time and offline VFX for a Houdini artist
  • How to work within the constraints of real-time
  • Rigid body destruction – building and optimizing a pipeline (00:09:18)
  • Creating velocity fields and flowmaps (00:54:42)
  • Creating looping fire sequences (01:11:45)
  • Using Houdini to Prototype ideas
  • How The Coalition improved their rain system (01:30:00)
  • Q&A (01:40:00)