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Taught by Valerie Cripps, this new introductory course will give you an introduction to Houdini 9.5, getting you familiar with the interface, procedural workflow, and some basic fx principles. The software is vast and used in most of the big production houses for many types of film effects. Getting these basics is a great way to open the door to creating killer visual fx for film production. Over the course of the term, you will learn the building blocks necessary to create a foundation for further production lessons in Houdini with a mind to creating film effects. The course begins with a solid overview of the UI and application principles and then dives into a sample project for the rest of the term.
Cripps worked at Side Effects Software for 7 years before going into production in 2003. She has worked as a freelance fx and lighting artist at Sony Imageworks, CBS and Rhythm and Hues on films such as Superman Returns, Spiderman 3, and Mummy 3, among many others, working on effects such as swarms of flying locusts, flames, crowds, snow, dust, clouds and more.
Members may use the Houdini Apprentice addition, which is available as a free download from the Side Effects web site. For only $99, a Starving Artist Edition of the software is also available which allows for watermark-free renders up to HD resolution -- perfect for adding a shot to your demo reel. Both versions of Houdini Apprentice include all of Houdini Master's features except for the ability to render to third party renderers. Files created using the Apprentice versions cannot be opened in the full version of the software. However, upon upgrading to the full version, Side Effects will do a one time conversion of all your non-commercial work to Houdini's commercial format.
Professor: Valerie Cripps (ValCripps)
Class 1: Intro to the Interface, Part 1 Get an intro to Houdini's node based, procedural workflow, learn about all of the different types of editors (from modeling to compositing), get your work flow and personal settings going, and find out where to get help, plug ins and more.
Class 2: Intro to the Interface, Part 2 Now that I've shown you where most everything is, let's get used to the interface via a very simple example and put into practice what we learned in the first lesson, so we'll be rockin' as we go through the rest of the term.
Class 3: Continuation.. We use planning and 'trickery' to adjust our source geometry to avoid the problem of our particles not colliding correctly. We also talk about adjusting color preferences for the interface, coloring nodes, adding notes to nodes, bypassing nodes, accessing primitive numbers and using them in the group parameter of SOP nodes, as well as displaying and adjusting point normals to create initial thrust and velocity for our particle system. We then get into the stamp feature of the copy SOP, using a random variable to create varied sizes for the spheres in our particle system.
Class 4: In this lesson, we learn how to load in the dragon object, and load in a back plate. We make point groups to isolate different parts of his body. We then use the soft transform node to adjust the model, and also to create some rudimentary animation on the dragon for our project. Since in production, we'd normally get the file and animation from modeling and animation, we're not doing rigging in this class, and instead continuing to focus on introductory concepts and our focus on fx. We also cover some more concepts of working with nodes and the Houdini interface. Now we will be ready for next week's lesson, where we can take this animated dragon and use the intersection of his wings with the ground and their velocity to drive our particle system that will be used for the dust hits.
Class 5: We continue our dragon dust hits project by learning how to write out the dragon file to disk using a geometry ROP. We'll also continue learning interface tricks, learning to create a netbox to organize our nodes, and discuss adding a Null SOP at the end of node chains to work cleanly. We'll also discuss the object merge node, and how to set up the attribute transfer so that when the wing intersects the ground plane, a point group is created from which we will eventually birth particles. Finally, we'll discuss the geometry spreadsheet as a mode to view point attributes and detailed information in a table format.
Class 6: Continuation, using the point group we created that happens every time the dragon wing intersects the ground plane. We use this point group to birth particles and explore a variety of parameters in the Source POP, including per frame birthing, setting initial velocities using the normal variables, and other information. We then learn about additional POPs to shape and control the particles.
Class 7: In this Lesson we will continue working with pops and finish setup up the motion of the particles. We will also prepare for the lighting and rendering stage.
Class 8: In this lesson we will get a new camera with a better track for our shot, and set up the lighting for the shot. We talk about 3 point lighting, rendering with mantra rops, using mplayer, bundles, shading, shadow mattes, and writing out sequences.
Class 9: In this class we set up a Houdini environment variable, render motion blur and learn about deleting extra attributes. Then we take the passes of the dragon and dragon shadow that we rendered and brought them into cops where we composited them. We also start our shading for the particles, and add an extra attribute to set opacity so that the shader can recognize it. Finally we set up out hold outs for the particles layer.
Class 10: In our final class we will put an fxcomp of all of our elements and see our result. After seeing the comp we will fix some obvious issues that become apparent. Then we will work in VOPs to further develop our dust shader and learn about the rest positon sop. We will also talk about what else could be done to complete the shot and how we would have done the rendering in production if we had those resources.


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