FX Artist Journey: Breaking into the Industry with Emily Fung

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hi everyone thank you for joining us here this evening for our live stream event effects artist journey breaking new industry with emily fung my name is bo jansen i'm an educational lead here at noman and it's a great honor i'll be introducing and hosting our guests here tonight but before i introduce them a couple things i want to add in first i want to thank lenovo for sponsoring this event lenovo helps us continue to bring these free educational events to all of you so thanks as always to lenovo uh this evening our guest emily fung is going to be using lenovo's thinkpad p1 gen4 to show off some of her amazing work for us um also this livestream event is going to be added to our stream catalog and it's going to be available to watch on our youtube and twitch channels after the event concludes our events including this stream are going to be available with closed captioning via the nomen facebook page you can find a link to our facebook page up here in the chat and with that said let me go ahead and introduce our guest now for the evening we have emily fung emily fung is an effects artist with a generals to background after graduating in 2018 she works a 3d artist in the uk for a year on such films as the lion king and dumbo she then began her north american journey as an intern and subsequently a technical artist at side effects which was an invaluable experience in developing her skills within houdini she is now working as an effects artist in the vfx animation industry and joining us later on after emily's presentation will be rob hoffman and fianna wong to join us for a q a session uh rob hoffman is worldwide media entertainment manager for novo workstations and fianna wong is a technical marketing lead at side effects so that said want to welcome emily fung hi hello hey there thank you for joining us here this evening we appreciate you uh taking the time to present some of your amazing work for us thank you yeah thank you for having me here i'm really excited um to be sharing a bit about my journey of becoming an effects artist and so today i'm going to be uh breaking down some of the projects stuff i've worked on at side effects and sharing my experience there as an intern and technical artist and then i will also share just some general career thoughts and stuff um and hopefully it's quite relatable and not boring for everyone oh absolutely not yeah i've seen your work it's gonna be really cool so uh thank you so much let you um let you have out of here oh thank you so um yeah so my name is emily and um again very excited to be here uh i'm just gonna talk a bit more about myself so i'm originally from hong kong and i graduated from bombings university in the uk in 2018 and after that i worked in london for a while on ferris projects so i started as a 3d intern at freefork and where i worked on commercials or mainly commercials there and then i was at npc working on cfx on dumbo and the lion king and then i was a fearfx artist at untold studio um where i did some crowds on the crown so you can see it's a big mix of things and i was really ready to further study my houdini skills at the time because um you know the more i figured that that's to learn i just want to spend more time learning so that's when i got the side effects internship offer and i just decided to move to canada and um and start again so um right now i am based in vancouver and and i'm an effects artist at animal logic so i think i'm just going to play my reel and i will go from there so i'll talk over it um there's no music uh so i have got my paro trial demo project that i worked on for houdini 18.5 and i've included some breakdown in my showroom just to showcase how i created this project and then i've got the fvm demo that i work for houdini 18 also for the sneak peek video and here is some of the work that i worked on for the side effects animated short i will talk a bit more about these projects later on and that also included some of my work at npc where i did cfx for the lion king and dumbo and then some simulation and crowd work that i worked on at until studios and free folk and also includes some personal projects such as my procedure tree generator it's just to showcase a different set of skills i guess and lastly another personal project i worked on when i was a side effects which i'll talk a bit more about as well in a bit yeah so that's my reel um let me move to the next one yeah so um i just want to talk a bit about my life at side effects so um there are two offices uh side effects i've got the toronto office and the la office and for my internship i was um at the toronto office and um i was originally intern there i was there for around eight months and then i became a technical artist and the work i did for both jobs were quite similar so i'm just going to talk about it all as a whole here and just to let you know that every intern has a different experience because the internship is all year round so uh it depends on what jobs there are at that time then everyone will kind of do different things so one of the main thing that we get to do as intern is to help out on producing demo contents for the houdini releases and i was there for houdini 18 and 18.5 and so these are the demo that i worked on so the first one is the fem simulation for houdini 18 and that was to showcase the updated um fem model for better full and preservation and what's really cool about this demo is that we get to work with the developers and we get to ask them any questions that we want and if we're unsure how to use the tools they will go through with us really patiently and answer any technical questions that we had and that's really cool and i work with emma heal on that project which is the developer to that created the fan software which is really cool and um on top of that i worked for 18.5 i worked on a few more projects so um here's the demo for the pyro trail tool i don't know if you've seen this in the sneaker videos but um yeah so it's really cool to be featured in those videos um and for that project i worked with the tiller which is our uh developer for some of the new power tools and um he had artist experience before uh being a developer so i also got to ask him a lot of artistic questions as well and learn from him which was a really valuable experience and um apart from doing fully rendered projects we get to do a few viewport capture as well because they might be better to showcase the tool or um we don't have enough time so here i've got the scatter and lines swap demo and the film brush demo that i worked on as well and apart from using houdini we get to do other things that um help the demo so for example in houdini 18 it was when solaris came out and i got the chance to texture these scenes um so then we can bring them into solaris and test them with uh the karma renderer and it was definitely challenging because i'm not a texturing artist um but definitely fun to try something new and learn a new skill and um yeah so and another thing that i got to work on was the side effects animated short uh the dawning it came out i think a couple of months ago and uh for this project i helped out with uh scattering rocks and some pyro simulation for atmospheric dust and some texture fixing as well as mainly my job was to look after the renders on the farm so it was again a new skill to pick up which was really cool and sometimes uh depending on what time of the year it is sometimes we get to write for magazines so i was really fortunate that i got to write an article for the 3d world on some of the things that i've learned when i was doing my fem simulation project um so yeah definitely another nice challenge to have because i haven't written anything since like high school so that was a fun experience for sure and then after we've done all these projects we have got you know a lot of knowledge either from like tips from the developer or ourselves uh we get to make a tutorial for them so the users can hopefully look at them and learn something new from them so i did a scattering tutorial um for in houdini 18.5 and i also did a houdini user group talk for the fem stuff that i learned and after we finished all these projects um we would clean them up and put them on the content library which is quite a new um feature on the side effects.com it's really cool if you haven't checked it out you really should because it's got all these free files that were created by artists and interns and developers as well and um they're all free and really good to get you started and i also uh am responsible for just looking after it and like organizing some of the files and doing screenshots for them and writing description for them so they are you know they make more sense when you you go into the website and so apart from office work we got um a lot of other activities as well um so obviously that's pre locked down um this is the user group my houdini user group talk and um after the top we normally you know hang around this was done it was in the side effects side effects headquarters um and then all the local artists would come and join and you know we got to meet new people and connections which is always nice and then there is the um houdini 18 launch which was in montreal and you know all the interns we just kind of got bus up and uh just helped out on the day and it was really cool because we got to see some of our work in the big screen when scott was going through the new features so that was really cool and another part of the internship that i really loved was the studio visit so our lead vienna organized a bunch of studio tours for us um and locally for toronto we went to mr x and pixelmundo and some other studios as well and um i was quite lucky at the time we had an intern in la that vienna organized some tours for and you know once i found out they're going to blur i just invited myself and went run with him and yeah so it was really eye opening to see all the studios they're all different sizes they have you know different amount of people they're all doing different work and at the time it was really inspiring and you know made me really thought about what i want to do after the internship and yeah the most important thing of the internship is the other interns so we all became friends and we still keep in touch and everyone's gone and done awesome things so it's always nice to you know have a group of um friends and just hang out and talk about houdini so that's nice um so after talking about side effects i thought maybe i'll go into houdini and just break down some of the projects that i've worked on uh so the first project i want to talk about is this hallway project and it was a personal project that i did at the end of my internship and the reason for that was um well we had some downtime after the release so we got to kind of choose whatever we wanted to do while cleaning up files and preparing for content library and stuff so i decided to do this project mainly just to challenge myself to do something i've never done before and um oh sorry uh yeah so that that wasn't uh oh sorry i got uh got caught somewhere um yes so i was doing this project um for pyro and vellum sim so i will just go through how i did this whole project so um for the horror project i started just i was inspired by this film for video uh which was just a corridor on fire and i thought it looked really cool so i just decided to do something very similar um not much creative uh input there and uh the first thing i did obviously was to create a gather bunch of references and the hallway was mainly inspired by the grand prix pass hotel and uh the shining so the grandfather hotel was a great film i loved it and the shining was i haven't seen it because it's um it's scary um but nonetheless the references were really useful and also gather some real live hallway references and some power references as well before i start so um i modeled the whole hallway in houdini procedurally and i just wrote down the list of things a basic list of things i wanted to do because i had time constrained so i just thought i would just start and see where it takes me so this was the original list that i had and i thought if i have time i could build on top of it and but these were the main elements and um the reason for modelling in houdini uh first thing is that uh is the software that i'm most comfortable with so if i were to do this somewhere else it would have taken me twice the time which i didn't have um so that was a big reason to use something that i found efficient um and um and then another thing is the non-destructive workflow that houdini provides uh given that i didn't plan it that much um i figured that there would be a lot of changes i want to make along the way so i figured that procedure modelling would allow me to change my assets really easily without um too much problem so that's the main reasons i chose to use houdini so um the way i do procedure modeling i normally start with something really simple like a line or a point um or just simple primitive like a grid but nothing too complex because i think if you start with something complex then along the line like down the line you will there will be a lot of problems created and it will be harder to add specific details that you want so i tend to keep things very simple and so they build on top of it and yeah so in terms of order of things um i definitely start with the base start with the element that will affect all the other elements first and then for example this store i would start with a grid and then figure out how i want to add the details on top of it because the details are independent from uh yeah because if i change the details i shouldn't affect the base which is why i would do whatever is the most important first and yeah and then if the elements are independent from each other then it doesn't matter what which way you do them in uh so here i do the door lambo at the same time just depends on what i was feeling and then the whole wall was controlled by one line so when i changed the line which i figured i might have to shrink my room if i didn't have enough time um so that was really really handy and but when i change the line i can uh change how the doors were scattered and how the walls look so i would do things in that order and so here's just some of the elements layered up and i'll show you the houdini scene yeah so this is my scene uh i didn't clean it because i thought i would show like the truth uh of the mess um but anyway i did try and put them into section just so it's a bit clearer for me and so here is um for example how i build the wall uh yeah so these are all individual elements i just kind of merge them together and i always hard code things first before i link them together because i figured that's actually saved my time the most um if i pre-link things together when they break i would be confused as to you know what's happening so i do things slowly and starting from the most basic things and here brings me the other reason of modeling procedure modelling in houdini for my scene um i had a few cloth that because i want to practice my vellum as well and i feel like also in the hallway you get generally just a lot of curtains and tablecloths and stuff like that and i find that if you want to do anything dynamic and modelling then houdini is really easy for you to put the two together in no time so even just as a placeholder i can um here i can just create this curtain and um it could be static just for you to use as a proxy geo where you want to do testing a light test or even if you want to just scatter the background with it that's fine too and if you want to sim it you can easily just bring the setup out and sim it and replace it with your simulation so just quickly go through how i did this curtain if you're interested um again start with simple grid uh this was just a placeholder so every settings were the lowest because then it would save time um yeah so we'll pin uh grip the pin that's pinning to the um frame and then i have a target here where it's animated because i want the curtain to shrink so i can get some nice uh you know ruffles and just really basic vellum uh setup so constrains for the the felon and then i didn't change any settings because it was gonna be a static frame anyway um and then i just pin them to the top and i just run it in the solver i just used two sub steps which i think if you want to do a decent seam you want at least four but as you can see and then i just cashed out a frame at the end and that's that's done like you get you get some decent looking cloth that you can use as a placeholder or just in the background and this is one of the reason why i was really certain that i want to use houdini for this project um yeah so this was some of the models that i did and um i just want to show you when i said non-destructive what it really meant um so for example here i if i still want to change something even right now and that's and like for example i want to change how i scatter these lamps i just have a little script here that is just basically evenly uh put a point in on the wall and i can choose how many points i want so even right now i can just so easily change makes iteration really easy and um i would you know show this to vienna which would give me some feedback and if she goes oh maybe less lamps and i can just go and change this button and then that's done so for me that's really convenient and the same thing if you want to go in and just play with the um the models a bit if you like set everything up uh procedurally which is what you would do in houdini and then everything is just linked together and it's so easy to change and make adjustments so yeah that's the base of my model and after i model this scene i just cashed out and bring it to another scene for simulation but there were some assets that i you know i was quite happy with and i feel like maybe i want to bring it to um and other projects and i would just clean it up and make into a digital asset and that brings me to kind of the next thing i want to talk about so for the plant um i created this plant um i know he's lacking a bit of detail but he was at the back of the corridor so i didn't bother um but i did quite like it how it turned out at the time so i thought i'm just going to bring my setup up and clean it and make you into an hda so so uh that brings me to another houdini scene i'm just gonna close that one so i'm gonna go through how to build uh an hda and not necessarily from from scratch uh i'm just gonna include some really interesting points i found i did this drawing because i thought it might help me explain it but i don't think it will um so uh to begin with any procedure modelling i would break down different elements and for this plant i've got the leaves and the vas basically it's quite a simple model so i figured that i want a leaf that i could control the shape of and then a bunch of leaves maybe with customizable shapes and then i just want to merge them all together and make the asset and that's kind of what my plan was and um so to see if it works i tend to again hard code everything and just to do it like a proof of concept before i clean everything up cool so again start with something simple a line a point a grid um so here i've got a line where i give it a p square attribute and it's controlled by a ramp and then i use a sweep node to create the shape by changing the surface type to ribbon and after that that's basically the you know the base of a leaf and then after that i just i tried to add more details to it by copying some uh chip onto the leaf and these are all again like they don't look the best right now because um it's a test on whether the thought that my plan is going to work or not and um after that we can go back and fiddle with the attributes later on but i figured that it you don't want to waste time doing something if it's not going to work uh yeah so it was just basically uh when i do procedure modeling it's all about you know adding details so um noise is really important so i just add a bunch of noise to it and um you know also give it some some uh just detail in where the stock is going to go and then i pretty much yeah give it a stop make it two face and that's the base of my leaf and after that i wanted to test that or whether the scattering with different shape is going to work and instead of making it linked all together nicely i just copied my network a few times go in and change the value and so these were some of the versions that i had and then i just copied them onto a circle that i can change later on and merchant with the fast and that's um normally how if i want to test something that's that's kind of how fast i would do it in because then um if it breaks somewhere up then i won't have to go all the way to figure out that it's not going to work um so yeah so after the proof of concept is done um we can start thinking about or how we want to clean this up because you know you definitely don't want to copy the network five times to just create some leaves that's inefficient and also not really usable if you know i want to use this in another project so um while i'm cleaning up because i know i'm making it into an hda so i will start planning my ui and try to integrate the the cleanup and my ui like together uh so the way i was thinking maybe i want to get uh do the leaves is that um the user so myself or people that might use the tool um can change uh can have their sort of um customized option for how the leaf is going to look so we can use that ramp for it and then i want the user to be able to input as many variations that they want and then we can randomly pick these leaves and scatter onto the plant and the vas at the end and add it all together nicely so at this point i wasn't sure how i'm going to achieve this with and using an hda so i think i'm going to show you how i did this because i think it's really interesting and really useful if you want to make something similar so i'm just going to show you with some simple geometry so my idea was to have as many um you know geometry i want that uh the user can input and then they should be able to control each element individually so that's kind of the idea and first thing first when we build uh the hda we want to work on the some of the ui stuff and uh group your network into a subnet and you can just put those away i don't really use them um and then to begin with um i want to promote this solid type so the user can choose what shape they want to be and i don't i would say i'm not sure how i can do that i don't know what what ui i want to use and i found a really good tip if you um ever find something that you like in the ui and you don't know how to achieve this you can just go in the node and if it's one that you can open you can go for type properties and in parameters you can actually see how the developers and or the tds created the node so here i can just see oh it's uh it's an integer and then there is a menu that allow me to use all these drop downs so um if it's um an open like a note that you can open you can just ctrl c ctrl v into your own parameter and then accept and you can see it that i'm now bringing the um parameter outside into my ui and so this is not linked yet so um obviously when i change it it's not going to work but if i just go copy parameter and paste relative reference then you can see um that it's all linked together and i and if you want to do the same when you want to look at how the ui is built then and in the note that's not open then you can't use the type properties because it's all locked and you can't see it but um you can go to edit parameter interface and even though you can't copy these because these are all grayed out but at least you can still see how it's built and you can just you know make your own uh by just copying how it's done i think it's a great way of learning if you don't know how to do something just you know look like an example and um and then you can add extra stuff that you want on it as well so that's nice uh yeah so i'm just going to put um some transform options and again i just copy the parameter and put it inside and that's kind of how you know i'll build an hda just slowly deciding what parameters i want and then exposing those permit outside and see you can control it so back to the leaves because i want the user to be able to create as many shapes as they want while controlling individual attributes and the way we can do that is to use a multi-prime block and i think this was a really cool technique um so we we can use a folder and then just put it to multi-prime block i'm just going to leave it like this and what this does is you can create as many of these as you want and these will support this will be our leaves and we can add as many leaves as we want and then we can bring those leaves in and then scatter them or do whatever we want with them and so how are we going to um you know put the attributes on i'm going so the way to do it is actually to use a for loop so with the for loop you can uh you know it generate the geometry a couple of times and then you can change the parameter for each iteration and that's kind of the idea of it so first thing first we will change this to um merge each iteration and then see the situation determines how many times you're going to do this operation and this actually is what we're going to refer to with this one because if we want to geometry that means we want two iterations so we're just gonna put that in and the next thing i'm going to do is to do a creamette import node and what that does is it gives you access to these additional detail attributes the one that we want to use is iteration so the way i do this just to keep things neat is to drop a null i'm gonna call it val again i just hide these and i'm going to just create a integer i'm gonna just so this is uh our iteration cool and obviously we want to link our actual value onto this so what we can do is um do use the detail expression and then we can access the iteration value from there and we're doing iteration and then plus one because the for loop starts from zero but then our folders start with one so we just do plus one and now this iteration represents um basically each one of these so how are we going to link them together so we can do a test the way i figure out how this worked was that i copied the first one and i just pasted it again onto the relative fix the paste relative references and if you go in here you can actually see what the expression is and it says type 1 and then i figured that type 1 means the first folder that you create and type 2 would mean the second folder and all we have to do is to add in the iteration value then we will have individual control over each object so what we can do is we can just do type plus our iteration value and then hope that that works and when we change the second one now you can see that you can control each individual objects that the user input and let's just do the same for the transform we'll just paste the relative reference value and you can see that's one because we copied the first one and all we have to do is just to add the same iteration value and i just copy and paste it and change the index oh and then now hopefully that will work yeah and you can see then how we can um add as many as hold as you want and we can individually change uh individual attributes and that was kind of um yeah that was kind of um how i decided to the method i decided to use for my plant and um so i've got it ready here because i don't want to go through that again and um yeah so here i've got the folder set up and i can add another leaf and i can just go in and change all these uh the attributes i decided uh imperfection let's say i want a version with no imperfection and i can also change you know the shape of the leaf the size the scale and that you know have no effect on the first leaf and then that was my idea and then and then what i did was i just use all the leaves and randomly pick them and place them in a in a pot and also have some additional control you know how many we're scattering so that that was i thought a really cool method because it allows the user to be super customizable with with the tool and not limited to you know how the plan uh how they want the plan to look so right now even though this was for the plant that i had the reference for i feel like you can still change the shape so much that it can be something else so let's just go inside and yeah basically it was the network that i just went through how to build a leaf but i'm putting in the for loop now so i don't have to copy the subnet a few times again so you know you can see how much more efficient it is and the same method that i just showed you with uh yeah the meta import node and we just take the iteration out and um yeah when we choose what parameters we want to expose they to promote them so the user can use them we just make sure that we are referencing the right one so at the length of each plant i'm just doing um the length so i'm just copying the parameter outside bring it back in and add the iteration value so you can now see it's all changed according to what the user input is and yeah it takes a bit of time uh it's time consuming but it's um but it's it's quite fun as well i think uh because you can kind of just decide oh that node you don't want someone to use because it will break something you can just not promote it and no one will use it so yeah that that's that and um yeah i just brought in the copy bit and the circle is where i control the size of the scattering and how many i want to scatter on and yeah just bring those in and put the also uh the the fast in here as well and that's pretty much it uh that was one additional feature that i added just for fun which was uh the option to add textures so again i'm no texture artist uh this was just to test new tools and so um if you don't have the side effects labs tool um you should download it it's um so the way to do it you can there is a shelf tool called side effects labs tool and if you haven't got it then you would just have this update tool set option but none of these and all you have to do is just click on that and then download the latest version that works with your build and at the side effects app store is i think it's it's it's amazing because um it gives you a lot of additional notes assets that you can use and for example this substance plug-in is it comes with the side effects labs tool and so what this does is you can just drop down a lab substance material and i just created this marble texture thing in substance designer it was only a few notes because i yeah not great at texturing and but um so you just have to generate a substance archive file and then you just bring it into houdini like so just import it here and now i'm just going to zoom in a bit for my ugly texture and you can see the primates that you expose in substance you can now change in houdini which i think is just so awesome because it means your tool is all wrapped as one and you know you don't have to go somewhere else to do things but you can also utilize the awesomeness and other software as well um if you're more comfortable doing that uh so yeah so that's kind of my tool and um i want to show you what i do next when i have my 2 ready so i'm quite happy with the way it is now and uh before we do anything else i recommend again going to the type properties oh which i no sorry the parameter interface and in for each attribute you can set your default so if you find something that works the best for your tool i recommend recommending that your default so when someone else open it then they will look at the you know the tool at its best date and then um also if we keep changing the parameters and they still look wrong then you can just go refer to default and you can start again uh yeah so before we uh before i make it into an hda so wrapping it up i tend to run wedges on them first um so wedging means that you can give a bunch of different values and it will just give you put those values into your attribute and then provide different results and the reason why i wedged was i was wedging this tool was to make sure that with procedure modeling sometimes if you change one thing the whole thing would break so if you wedge those different parameters then you can see um it's almost a test to see how breakable it is because it's all random values and the way i did this was that i just copied and pasted my network the one that i think is ready to go and i added a bunch of uh attribute to the attribute to the parameters that i want to wedge so the scattering number of leaves uh how bendy it is um you know it's at least up to you what you want to test on um but normally if you just pick a few uh of the main ones and um if it breaks then that you'll you'll know um anyway so after we give it some attributes that we want to wedge we can drop down with top net and there are two there are a few ways to do this the main thing is to drop down a wedge node and put down all the attributes you want and you can define uh those individual values as well at what value you want to watch a widget you can do a random samples or you can do specific values and then you can either write them out um using the rope geometry output so they will save out your geometry as you know a file that you can read them back later or if you want to go further you can render all these wedges and then make a contact sheet just to see or what kind of stuff my tool can make and but i'm not doing any of those i'm just going to wedge them so um before you do anything in tops i recommend that don't cook it straight away cooking means that um cooking means that you know you are doing the operation so if i'm cooking this note then it's going to start saving out geometry so uh you want to always generate note on the one that you want so i'm just using the wedge i'm just doing it here and generate doesn't actually cook the note it just tells you what you can expect to see it after you cook it and it's really uh i think it's you have to do that before you you send your note to anything else because i've had problems when i was rendering something and i accidentally looped it a few times and it was rendering 10 times more than i wanted and just kind of broke everything if i had done generate then i'll see that it was expecting like 2000 outputs and that's wrong um and then i can change it before i send it to the farm or breaking my local machine um so definitely generate your node and then here we can add your task graph table and it will tell you exactly what value they're going to watch because we're doing random samples instead of specific values so um you can see here all the values that we are expecting to input into our tool so because we're not writing it we can just press on these oh actually uh view this first because that's the output uh yeah and then we can just go then the tool will input all these values back into our tool our ui and you can see then let's just do a few more cool and then you can just see like real time that my tool i don't think it breaks as much um well it it's okay i think it's ready to be wrapped up um yeah so i'm just going to quickly show you how to wrap up an hda i tend to copy again because i just just in case so here i copied my tool that's ready to go and um i would just go right click and create digital asset and here i hope you can see um but you can choose the name and the label and i'm just changing this to plant gen and i always recommend when you are making an hda to allow it to version up and the way you can do this is in the operator name you can do double colon and then 1.0 and that means that is first first and one major version and zero minor version and i'll show you why that's great in a minute so yeah we can just accept this and no changes cool and you can see this is bringing us to the type properties that we've used a few times already and a few things you can make give a beautiful icon like my drawing and then sometimes i add an extra script so on created for example i can do a little python script that changes the color of the node on create on creation so i tend to do small scripts like this because i'm learning python so i find that the more little things you do it or builds up at the end and at the end you can you know do something bigger and it's just a useful little practice and it also allow you to make your tool a different color which is which is always nice um sorry just gonna accept that and now if i you can see that i'm doing this this note is you can access this note and when you create it it's this beautiful green with this um awesome drawing that i did um obviously you can make it a lot prettier if you want um yeah so uh i want to talk about the versioning which is something that i find really useful and first thing first i think this is on on default on linux but windows i think you have to go in and turn it on i'm sorry about the ui i have to change the resolution but this is the asset manager and in here you can see that you have got a few options so you want to go display menu of all definitions and you can see this little thing that pop up it shows you your asset name and where you save your asset and uh what this does is um for example if i want to update my tool or i found a mistake and i want to change something i can just go allow changing content and let's say i don't know i want to make it pink uh for whatever reason it's just to show that it's it's a test yeah so i want to make a pink and i go oh i want to save this out again as the default or i want to save this whole network out again as a new tool because i've made some changes uh you don't want to overwrite your tool because you always want to you know increment save just as you would with hip files or you know other files and so what you can do uh because we have declared the version as 1.0 there is this option to version your digital asset i think this whole versioning also comes with the labs tool which is another reason to download it if not i'm i think you can also do it just by doing it yourself as well but um this is just a bit easier so let's say it's a small change you want to increase minor version and you can see this this um new uh this uh ui just saying uh changing from version 1 0 to 1 1 and we can just go confirm and then you can see now we have two versions and if we just go back to the old version in the old network there's no pink color and then you can interchange between versions which i think is so good at keeping track on your hdas if you know you're going to update it and you know i think you you know you always learn something new and you want to add something to it um which is super good and let's say oh i won i changed a bunch of uh values and i realized i'm using the wrong version uh all you have to do is just to go back and it saves out those values that you input already so it's just a really um efficient way of doing things i find um yeah so definitely going to do my hdas like this in the future um yes so that's kind of what i have to share for creating your own hdas and um i thought maybe i can just quickly talk about some simulation side of things uh instead of going through like how i do this i want to say i want to show you how i approach it if that makes sense um so when i start something that i don't know how to do which happens a lot um i would see what i need to do first i break down break them down in different elements um so here i i know that i want to do a cloth that's gonna shrink according to the temperature and i want it to shred when it reaches a certain temperature and then i want some fire on top of it as well and so i figured that i want a vellum sim and a pyrosim and you can think about the secondary elements as well um which is like embers or any additional bits but i tend to just think about them but not focus too much on them and just focus on the main thing so right now um i want to do pyro and vellum and the next thing i want to do is to think about the order of things so obviously you can always do it all in one dot net so it's like a two-way sim um but in this instance i figured that i would do the phelum first because i want the pyro to pick up the shredding from the vellum and um you know it's not the perfect method because then that also means the vellum is not going to get the forces from the fire but we can fake that you know we can add windfalls and fake that that's from the pyro and then and then we can still do two separate sims and um i think it's the same for a few other effects as well if you do destruction you want to do the lbds first and then those will drive the dust and the debris so yeah i think it's uh good to think about layers and orders as well uh yeah so let's let's jump into houdini to showcase this so as always whenever i do anything i start with a grid or anything simple um but especially vellum it's tend to be a like a plane so uh a relatively low res uh because it's again a proof of concept so it's testing what i have in mind is going to work if you spend too long making it look nice and then you're just going to waste time if if it's not going to work um so this is not going to look nice it's just how i test methods and then you will spend the time to um you know to fiddle with it and um i figured i want to use the phylum pyro source sorry the pyrosource spread um you can use your own solver for sure um but i wanted to use this because i know that i'm going to bring these attributes in for my parallel simulation so i thought i'll just use this tool it's nicely wrapped it's it's got a bunch of things that you can play around with to create the perfect source for you um so that's what i decided to go with and uh yeah so it takes in points i just have to make those and make my geometry into points and i because with all vellum sims you need to give it some pre-roll and so i thought as a test normally i'll give it more than here but i gave you 13 frames of pre-roll just to check the source spread works this way and um so let's visualize the temperature so this node the way it works is um you give it a hot region so this box here and oh sorry it should be i've done a bunch of so yes i made some noise to start it so yeah so the it will start spreading from this point and then it will just spread um according to you know what you change here and um you know the way i figured out how this node works was just to use the shelf tool i just dropped uh i think it was yeah spreading fire i just dropped that in maybe a different scene just to keep it clean or the same one and then just to see how it was set up by the depth and then just i think i just copied it and then add additional stuff uh to make it work for me uh yeah so i i tend to use shelter to learn i don't necessarily build my stuff using the shelter because the way they set it up might not be how i prefer it to look just in my network um but definitely great just press on all the shelf tools and and learn from them uh that's great anyway so that's how we can have our spread and i thought you know um that's what i need for the shrinking because i probably just need one attribute that drives the shrinking of the cloth and so i transfer this back to my uh cloth my um geometry because that's what you need to input in the vellum sim not points not these points and um and then i want to work on this the shredding and i you know tested a few things but i figured that i would freeze my temperature at the end frame and so i only gave it 50 frames again because i don't want to wait for my testing phase uh for the actual sim i think i waited for like a few hundred frames to reach the end um but anyway yeah so this is that and then i just transferred the last uh temperature onto my cloth again and i just took our bits from it according to the temperature so this is completely customizable we can just delete random bits of it so these are the bits i want to use as the shredding so i want to fracture my cloth according to the temperature and all we have to do is convert line and feed into this edge fracture node and now you see the cloth is being fractured into pieces that we can have full control over and then that's when in my testing phase i thought that's what i needed right to treading and shrinking so i've got everything that's ready to be simmed and so again setting up vellum keep everything in default when you're testing when i'm testing unless you know that's going to make a big difference if you have experience on doing something then you probably want to change something straight away because you know that's just not going to work um but here i think i just kept most thing default apart from like i think these i don't know if this default but i barely change anything um and then um yeah just pin the top uh just so it's not you know dropping is kind of stuck on the top so we can see what's going on at the bottom and then i tested a new thing that i have never used before which is the welding and that's how we can attach these broken fractured pieces back onto our vellum and then we can drive when it's going to fall um [Music] so uh yeah so here we've got when we do the uh welding constraints you can see that it creates an attribute called weld and so each point is actually two points and um it's just telling you which point it's welded to and when it's minus one it means it's not altered to anything and so yeah that's kind of what we need for our sim um in my planning phase and then i know that um when you input something to velum or they only take the first frame so i'm just preparing my attribute so i can read them in the sulfur as an animated attribute so i'm just transferring this to transferring that temperature and stuff onto the constraints and i'm just making it into something called like a crumble attribute which is just according to where it's burned um and maybe see so [Music] it's a bit slow because it's later on but i think if you can see that the um the clock the constraints getting darker and the darker area is what i want to use to drive my crumble my shrinking item of the cloth and so these are all ready to go so what i did was just to put it in a top net and i just dropped down uh the you know the default stuff vellum object vellum solver and a felon source we can just get rid of all of this for now and then first thing first to test that it's actually working as vellum you can see it's behaving like cloth um again loads of steps because it's just a test um so you can see it's almost real time kind of telling you what's happening which is good and then i just took the attributes that we prepared outside the animated burn and crumble attribute bring it inside and put it onto the constraint geometry and to check that it works we can choose display constraints and just play it and now you can see that the cloth is working as cloth but it's also getting the animated attribute that we are taking from outside it's a bad color decision but it's it's there i promise is that it's that the darker bit is where it's going to crumble and and the way we can control the shrinking is to use the wrestling scale actually if you hover over it actually tells you allows shrinking constraints so um you know if you don't know what to do um definitely just google it and sometimes you know you can definitely find something that's just right there too for you to pick up so um yeah so what i did was just do wrestling the equals crumble and that means that the combo attribute was animated by shrinking according to uh the pyrosource spread and now we are just driving the rest scale using this value so you can see that it's now slowly but i should be after 30 frames of settling and you can see that the cloth is now shrinking uh yeah so when i test i test on little tiny areas so i don't have to wait and i just assume that will work on big areas but obviously when you make it into your setup it will always have some well not always but it tends to have other problems that you have to solve along the way um so yeah just display the geometry you can see now the clock is shrinking according to the attribute that we provided and then i thought i was happy with this and just move on to the next test which was the shredding again i use the top solver this time i am pointing this to geometry instead of constrained geometry and copying all the attributes again because as a test i didn't know what one to use and but afterwards you can clean up to make it more efficient i just copy the attributes i want and i decided to use the total burn and this means so i'm just writing if total burn is more than 10 the welding is minus one and that just means if the total burn is higher than 10 then there will be no welding so it will the fractured pieces will just fall because it's not holding onto any points anymore and now we can test it out and the shrinking still works even with the additional changes and hopefully we are going to start seeing some bits started breaking yes so you can see that these bits are shredding because it's now not connected to the points anymore so i at this point uh as a test i was like yeah i'm okay with that that should work and so i moved on to the next thing so i just cashed it out cash out as every at every stage because it's just going to save your sim like you're just going to save time but when you are adding more and more things to it and when i'm doing this kind of uh proof of concept test i still try to set it up in a way that it's usable in when i'm making it proper um because all i need to do after this is i just have to change my input geometry and spend more time playing with this um the spreading then i can basically use the same setup and i don't have to do it again so yeah that's kind of how i did my phalum test and then i thought okay i'm just gonna input this and try it with uh to see if it interact with pyro just like i was planning and um i just time shift a bit because i didn't need the pre-rolls anymore for the apparel to save time again and because we already had all those attributes from the parasaur spread and they were saved in the vellum sim so all we have to do is we just rasterize those attributes at those points from the vellum sim and that's our source for the apparel simulation and obviously again after you've tested out you have to play with it a bit to get a nice looking source uh yeah and then just as a quick thing um i just imported i just did it again as default as simple as possible um i probably i don't know if i use the shelf tool to do the test probably did but i just input the attributes that you need for firesim like burn temperature velocity and such and um as a test it doesn't look good at all um but it's definitely working and that's what's important right um so you can see that it actually looks like the fire's driving the cloth uh so i was like oh this happy accident right and it works quite well because they're all actually using the same attribute so it's all consistent and that's why the movement quite believable in my opinion and yeah you can see that it is now you know interacting with the cloth it's interacting with the shredded pieces and that's that's um basically all you need to do for setting up uh like your effects and then what takes time after that is to make it look pretty and um you know wedging wedging all the attributes to get a nice source is good and you know working making sure your collisions working nicely and give it enough pre-rolls and patience and that was kind of what i did after my quick test and that's the final product looking back a few things i would like to improve on like higher resolution on the cloth and um additional forces to make it look you know like more windy um but you know it's you always learn after you do a project so that's kind of what i did and um yeah so i was quite happy with how it turned out it um yes i thought that was just how i would approach an effects that i've never done before um which is it's transferable for other things as well it's all about sitting down and planning your logic and testing it and then make it look nice afterwards and so that was what i wanted to share with my hallway project and i thought i would just do a quick breakdown for this um trial project as well so this one was not a personal project it was for side effects so this was for the i think i mentioned this before but for the 18.5 uh pyro trial tool that was developed by attila and uh big shout out to attila i know he's not watching this but um yeah he he was awesome he was guided me through so much artistic decisions and but also a lot of technical stuff as well i've learned so much from him and this wouldn't have been possible without him so a big shout out to him and oh sorry i think i i disconnected i don't know sorry about that am i back on oh sorry am i back i think you're back yes oh i'm so sorry i don't know what happened that's all good um uh uh yeah so uh yeah this was the project that i want to talk about so um the way we work for demo is that um vienna will and talk to the deaf and then we'll know which tools you want to showcase in the snippet video and um for this power trail video we obviously want to showcase the power trials and how to utilize the tool in our sim and after we know what tools we're going to use we will sorry oh yeah so uh normally fiona will come up with some cool ideas uh prior to telling us but we are welcome to tell her what we think as well and she will listen to us and and then we'll come up with a good solution so um yes she found the wife white phosphorus uh references for us um you know it's it's not uh you know great stuff but it was a good reference for what we wanted to achieve with the power trials because it has got a lot of smoke trials and uh before i start again gathering references i have a lot more than that but i figure i won't show it now um but the most the best reference i've found is actually this video from some scientists i think um they break down how it works and gave us actual values of how big it is and how tall it is and what we can expect from the react uh like where it hits and stuff and i think having actual values actually help the sim to go a lot more smoothly because we are simulating you know real world scale so um we could use those values in our sim and just create a pretty accurate simulation cool so um before we start we side effects uh normally have some kind of um a relationship with other companies as well so here we got some models from kit bash 3d to use for our demo and these are from the future slum collection i believe and these are all you know ready to use i don't know if they're destruction ready i haven't tested yet but they're definitely good for you know what i needed for my project and they're all you know fully ready to be rendered and which means i don't have to do more texturing work and so that's nice um yes so after that after we got the model ready we just kind of decided how we want to show the scene again attila help me big time here um uh we did went through a few iterations of cameras and because we want to showcase the trials as much as we can but we kind of still want to give it some you know of a story of dynamic uh sorry so yeah so that's kind of the final camera that we went for and just it's quite a simple setup so i figured i could show it to you now if you're interested um so you can see it's a way smaller network than my procedural model hallway um because the uh the new tool is super nicely wrapped and it you can do really cool things in the universal amount of time which is really cool and um so to begin with uh we will give it a point uh whatever whichever position we want to start and then uh we just give it a start frame where you want the explosions to start and then even though we're focusing on the trails there is still an explosion that's kind of causing the trials so we have to do an explosion as well and with this we uh instead of one explosion we're doing multiple so it looks a bit more dynamic and realistic and so we're doing we're adding four points here uh offsetting the start frame for each point slightly so it's kind of going boom boom instead of just one explosion and uh yeah and then we animated the points a bit so so it's going down like so uh because it comes with a velocity like the way it works is something kind of shoots down and it becomes trails so um we're just adding some velocity uh some movement to it before it explodes again i you know i've picked this up from nutella in terms of adding details to things like this and you know you can really add a lot a lot more uh little motions to your source really make a big difference in your simulation so yeah and then for the exposure we're going to use the perverse source which is another parallel tool and if you're interested there is uh i think ian which is our other intern at the time he did a longer breakdown on how to use the burst source because he did a just like a full-on explosion project so if you're interested you can check that out as well um yeah so for the uh birth source it's it's pretty self-explanatory um and i i wouldn't go through all the things because i think uh attila wrote a much better explanation than i ever will be able to to do so um i'm just going to talk about things that i think are particularly useful so the way you create sources using the burst source is um go to the burst component tab and you can add as many sources that you want for your explosion for your pyrosim and there's this additional option here that's a little dice and if you click on it it will generate this note called attribute adjust float which is new i think in houdini 18.5 as well and it's a it's just a note that allow you to um adjust your attribute and you can obviously do them anyway but this one is really nicely wrapped and i find myself using it a lot now because it's got so many options that you don't have to um you know you can really customize and fully decide how you want your attributes to be and plus randomization so it's super and uh yeah so all you have to do is to play with the source which is an important step for pyro having a good source and so yeah it's a bunch of options if you you just play with the parameters until you get something that you like there is no like golden rule for this um but yeah so we just kind of play with it a bit and make sure it's randomized and varied so it will give a more interesting simulation but also uh if in doubt you can always wedge them and you know put them overnight average them overnight and the next day you can come and choose a nice value that's also an option as well um yeah so that's just the burst and you can see you can check out the the speed the direction so you can kind of already kind of see how your explosion is going to look at this point so that's the source and then we just have to rasterize it as you do and this is our source for the parallel sim and then we just write it out again write how caches every stage um because it's uh yeah it's just more efficient that way and yeah so we didn't have to spend too much time on the bus because the main focus is on the trails so um yeah so here i've got the set up for the power trail so again using the same kind of idea which is giving a start frame and with the pirate trails there are two steps so you have the pyro trail path and then the power trail source and the power trail path allows you to completely just determine how you want the trail to look before you even make it into source it gives you a guide of where your trail is going to go and the speed and the shape and all that and what's cool about these tools these new tools is that they're open so what you can do oh sorry what you can do is you can go in and see how they were built and you know there's no better way to learn than looking at someone else's stuff so um so yeah that you can go in and see if you pick up any cool cool bits from the setup anyway um i'm not doing that now anyway so the cool things with this tool is that you can do additional guide which works with the pyro source you can see the black bit here is the power source and now we can really work out our timing the burst and then those trails these are the indicators of the trails and you can almost see how it's going to look before you even cash out the sauce so it's a super cool way to do explosions and at the same this is that actually that when we prepare this we have it comes with the time attribute that is a must uh to keep if we want to use the power trial source i think it's what kind of allows this node to to work it sees where um these the source is going to be at certain times so don't delete that if you want to clean up beforehand just keep the time attribute for sure and yeah here these are all again pretty self-explanatory and play with it um so for example one thing that i like is the option to add collision so you just input a geometry which i have a box and then you can just play around with the collision and you know these are all in sob so there's no way time you you've got the source ready to go and yeah and then it's the same stuff with the pyroburst source where we turned the trail into a pyrosource uh yes so again you can use the components to uh declare your sources so density and temperature and then you can play with noise and shape and all that um yeah so this is basically what we're gonna use for the trail and again just rasterize it and i have cashed this out to save time and you can see this is our source so this is a rough version of what i did um just to save time but um yeah it works right and i could already see how my sim is going to look really from the source and so uh drop down apparel silver we're using sparse um as well and yeah so it's after you've got a good source it's pretty straightforward from there you import all the sources that you need and then i added just some we just have some additional uh micro sulfur mainly just turbulence and disturbance nothing too fancy um and then yeah we just run it and i'm just gonna show the cache version but that's kind of what we get from that and you can see it's actually you can totally see that from the source um so now you know it's really easy to change and do the explosion according to you know how you want and um so yeah that's how i create this power trial and quickly just to show you a bit about shading uh because it's also some new features as well um so what we can do is drop down a parallel volume and uh you can see these little additional uh bits in the tip and we can actually so that this doesn't come with the original sources we added those additionally afterwards and the way to do this is we use the same trail path now to create these sources but instead of making them super long like this we're just making them super short and all we did we didn't even need to put in the same we just added afterwards we just make them into volume and just add it to our final cashed out sim as uh we call it just trail temperature yeah and then we just put in this fake volume and the big volume node is super awesome if you want to do anything if you do want to do pyro you should definitely check it out um so the way it works is you input all the fields that you want to drive the shader so uh density is uh the smoke is going to read the density meaning the density fuel is driving how our smoke is going to look so you know we can change density here and a sword you know chill on the viewport read quite correctly and we can just turn on making sure that you know we've got the right color correction and all that and then um sorry for scattering we've got flame which is the top bit and again it's all about playing and the the you know real time kind of uh feedback it just makes it so much easier to play with uh even just to you know just play around it's it's really cool and this really cool feature is masking the volume so uh when you want some crunchy details uh you can add this mask without it you can see it's nice and smooth but if you want is more detail looking you can add the mask in here and you can see it's using the density to mask out the flame field i think and then make a shader according to that and with the additional trails it's really self-explanatory you just add the trail temperature which is the ones here and they will just became the secondary fire and you see this is um it's just not it's not too complex and you get a decent looking like trail and so yeah we try and render it and hope that it renders uh yeah so uh to begin with we just use environment light which is just an hdri and then a distant light and then we are using the this one and when you test when you do test render or if you write the resolution to half or even smaller because you again like testing is all about saving time and you don't want to waste time doing a full rest render if if it just doesn't work uh yeah so uh we can also turn off this bucket you can choose what areas rendering so you can just check out specific areas that you change or something like that yeah so that's kind of how it looks and when we render from the pyro fake volume if the shader is applied to the the pyro so that's all you have to render out if that makes sense and then um one tip that attila shared with me uh which i think is awesome is to add some geometry lights on the little um additional trails at the little bit at the tip so the way to do it is we can drop down a parallel volume light make it a geometry light and we just reference the uh shader in the material uh parameter and then just say what geometry it is that we're lighting up and we're enabling point cloud here because i think if it's a complex geometry or volume you want to enable poincare to get the geometry light to work nicely but it's gonna take more time so it's you have to take a balance of how how many samples you want and just play with the rendering settings uh so just gonna drop in those volume lights that we just made and i hope that works let me take a snapshot so you can compare and i'm gonna just click on these areas because these are where i wanted yeah so you can see that now these tipping are now acting as lights and they are lighting up our whole trial as well as any back that we want to add yeah so you can see and obviously you can play with the exposure intensity and just to make it look the way you want so i'm not gonna wait for that but it yeah it works and um yeah so that's how i created one single trail and there are some additional um stuff that you can do to make it a little more interesting so really quickly just gonna share them with you and it's all about details right adding details after you've got the basic stuff um so what i did as well um yeah so we've got the trails and what we can do is we can add noise and i just add the two layer of noise one with the one is smaller noise on this bigger noise um just to you know give it some more variation detail and additionally we added some a second layer of trials and uh sorry so here we also did this so we have two sets of trail coming down because some of them might not shoot as far so then it's just playing with adding details to make it look more realistic same thing adding some noise to it and yeah and then it's the same i just used the same parallel sulfur for this um same burst just additional changes to the trails as you can see two sets of trails coming down now and exact same setup and you can see now we've got two sets of trails um this is the beginning of the sims so it's harder to see but when we add the additional light at the tip we can totally see that this is working [Music] so we've got two sets of trials now so set one set two and our pyro as well as the burst sword and the reason why this is now split up is actually another thing that we can do to give more detail to the renders by separating everything as a separate element we can give them individual geometry light so we have full control over each element and we can control oh the burst is brighter that one of the trails is you know less bright because it has got less velocity less explosion uh than whatever and so you can now i've got three volume lights one for each uh scattered volume and then you know they just have a different value then you can really make your renders look more interesting that way and uh let's try and render this as well i hope uh let's get rid of that one yeah yeah so let's try and render this one oh i didn't change the resolution i think so is it 4s um oh yes i didn't change the resolution for this one which i should have but uh it's all right as a test as well uh turn everything down and when you do the final render just you know and then also adjust according to different you know you want it to be clear but you don't want to spend like two days as well so it has to be you have to decide how you want the render values to be just according to the situation and it's something that comes with testing and you know experimenting and i'm definitely working on that myself as well so um so yeah it's definitely something that's worth you know practicing into so as you can see by turning off this now we can choose because i just want to see if the trails are working the secondary so i'm just going to move over it's this pretty fast i think i should have over yeah should have changed your resolution but oh um i think i can just assume that it's working oh should i override it now you know it's okay yeah i think it's working i can see it yeah let's say it's working uh anyway i'll just show you the final render because that definitely worked um yeah so this is what we can see as the multi trials uh more details in single trail for sure you know you can see those noise really showing up and uh just more complexity different layers it's all about layering things up as well and um at the end i also just play with the shader because it was really cool to see in real for and changing the colors and see what options you can get um so these are just some of my tests that i did and uh yeah so this is kind of what i have in mind for just breaking down some houdini scenes i did originally when i was at side effects we get to use some really new hardware so i was using a fabric and farm and so it was you know awesome um but right now i'm doing this demo on the lenovo p1 the thinkpad p1 gen4 and it's great as you can see you know we're doing everything in real time and works really well and i think there is a little video that showcase how it looks [Music] cool yeah so that's the video um if you have questions i think you can ask the specialist at the end um but yeah it's been it's been great for me and uh yeah i think i'm gonna finish this presentation with some final kind of thoughts on learning houdini and just general career stuff um so um when i started learning houdini it was super tough uh we didn't get any lessons at uni uh because it yeah we just didn't go houdini lessons um but we got to choose kind of what projects we wanted to work on and i felt quite lucky that i just decided to learn houdini using those project time and uh you know it started off very overwhelming i definitely went through a phase where i opened it put down a box and then give up and close it and a few times as well and these doing the assignments forced me to keep on going because i had to finish my assignment so if you have more self-discipline than i do then that's that's great um if not then certainly try to commit to a project somehow force you to finish it force yourself to finish it from start to finish um is how you can learn it so the way i learn it's not going to work for everyone because everyone has a different learning method but what i did was that i i watched a bunch of tutorials regardless of levels i didn't care if it was beginners or intermediate i just followed it just just so i can make something nice and pretty at the end to motivate myself to learn more and that really worked for me and although i didn't understand the majority of the tutorials at the beginning i would write down things that i did understand and also i started getting familiarized with the terms that they used and just you know how they do their setups and like their steps and it's just to get myself into the zone of learning houdini more than actually learning it and at the same time i'll be doing my own projects whether it's assignments or my own projects i will just pick something that i want to i want to achieve um and then i just do do it from scratch and those projects uh never looked as pretty as any tutorials that i did but it's okay because for me those were for me to really understand step by step what i was doing and that's when i you know learned how to google which um i think is a really important skill to have because once you know how to ask the right question uh not only will you get the answer from google but also that means you are understanding your logic better i find that if you can articulate your question it means you know what you're doing um so i i think that really helped me is start asking questions um so yeah so then i would do those projects and the more i do the my own project and forcing myself to learn all these bits the more the tutorials started making sense and and it's all relative and i find that that way i'm learning twice as much while still making something pretty although it's not like my setup but it's still something that encouraged me to keep going um yeah so that's how i learn and i think if you're new to houdini um it's worth spending time to find out what learning method works for you because then it means you're going to learn more efficiently and that means you're actually going to spend less time learning um so that's kind of what i did and um yeah i always keep a google doc where i put down any interesting thing i find it could be on the houdini artist's facebook page when someone say oh this line of code can do what you want and i found oh that's really clever and i just write it down my notes and maybe i can look at it later on put it in my own set up or tell someone else if they ask me the question so yeah i think communicating is also important i have a few friends that we use houdini and i have no shame in asking them any questions uh how stupid it is it doesn't you know we don't judge and um yeah so we just support each other and it's always nice to bounce ideas of other artists whether it's online or you know on the discord channels or in real life if you have people that learn it with you because you know everyone's learning different things and when you suck project but i tend to when i when i follow the uh sorry when i follow the tutorials um i don't tend to like make them put them in my showreel because at the end of the day it's not mine and i find that it's good to put something you worked on in your showroom because you will get asked those questions and in the interview and if it's something that you didn't do or you didn't fully understand then it would be difficult to explain why you did that approach where i took that approach and what you learned from those projects so i think following tutorials for learning but it's not you know for the final showcase um but yeah so that's harlan houdini and in terms of careers um i'm you know i don't want to give advice to anyone because i'm you know i'm still relatively new to the industry but there are definitely things i want to share which is um you know when i first graduated i applied for these internships and jobs just like all my friends did and i was definitely the only one that didn't get anything for the longest time and it was really demoralizing and i'm i was confused i don't know what to do and uh really sad and um so that was that was me for like a few months and then you know i also know people that from graduation they apply for one job and then they have been head-hunted since on like linkedin or other platforms and that this never happened to me um but that's okay that's when i learned that you know skills is important you can always improve on your skills um so which is why you know keep watching tutorials and stuff but at the same time there are other things that i do to limit those unfortunate you know the unluckiness of myself which is you know sometimes you apply for a job that either they didn't see your application they just hired someone right before you or you're just not right for them right now um so the way i limit those things is firstly i apply more jobs than like i think any of my friends because i figured that you know i just i have no luck and uh it's very often for me that they just didn't see my application or my email so you know you want to limit those factors and at the same time i although i'm not that sociable at all um but i still force myself to go to events and you know like the houdini thug talk you know i just wanted to after the presentation i was like i'm ready to go home but definitely stay on talk to people and um you know i actually got an interview just after that talk as well so you know things just happen uh if you you go and try you know go off your comfort zone and um yeah so i think basically the moral of the story is just not be too demoralized and um if you're not particularly lucky then you can do things to limit those unfortunate factors as well and um yeah so i think i think that's kind of what i have in mind for today and we can go into questions sorry i can't hear you that's because i am muted uh i didn't want uh to have you hear me uh ooh and ah over your work while you were doing your uh your presentation uh i want to bring a couple more people into the conversation i want to bring uh rob hoffman who's the worldwide media and entertainment manager for lenovo workstations and fianna wong who's technical marketing lead at side effects so welcome to you want to bring you all here into the conversation um we've had some really great uh questions come up in the chat uh just kind of across the board here um everything from getting into the industry and uh being challenged as an artist um how about this uh one thing starting off your emily uh question is there a specific area where you felt houdini has helped you grow as an artist yes houdini has really helped me to get get good well get better at problem solving because it's it's basically i think it's kind of visual coding so you have to know your logic to move forward with your setups and and for me if i want to achieve something i have to understand how to do it so it helped me practice uh logical thinking and just problem solving in general and debugging things as well cool and maybe to kind of uh uh springboard off of that someone asked if um going from production work uh to working with side effects then back to production um have you found much change in the way you work or approach problems uh problem solving in a shot on your work oh i abs yeah absolutely i so working in production first was actually quite uh it was cool because then i know what i want to learn when i had the time at side effects um and a side effect i you know looking at what how the def work i mean i'm not going to be a deaf because they have got level but uh they have such good problem solving skills and we have these weekly meetings and they share and they share um you know what they're working on and stuff and those are really inspiring and for example now i definitely want to make more tools uh for my work and even just in my own time and to help me with the artistic process so uh it helped me technically to be a better artist i think awesome yeah i can imagine working there at side effects it's like being at the uh the willy wonka chocolate factory where we're all the old magic items it's awesome it's oh and it's the fact that you know you you can see them you could be listening to their tutorials like the day before like their masterclass and the next day you are like you can see them in the kitchen and that's just that alone is this worth it for me very cool uh in terms of working there at side effects and people have asked about the internships uh advice for getting into internships how many do you take each term um i didn't know uh if fiona you want to speak to that um well so there are several internships uh at side effects so marketing is the one that emily was in uh but there's also education and there's also games uh internship um so they run throughout the year and it really depends on who's kind of already there and uh i can only speak for like our department like marketing um it's dependent on like what is coming down the pipe in the future so um it's hard to say like any specific number for me um but yeah i don't remember the rest of the question okay well uh how about this if someone wants to stand out as as an intern what do you look for in a candidate um like how deep do your uni skills need to be do you look more for personality technical ability artistic ability well actually like so all of the three um because you know there are interns that work together and sometimes they work on collaborating on projects and so everybody needs to get along and no fighting but also you you know it's not that uh i'm only looking at people who have houdini knowledge uh if you have like a 3d software background from another package um you know means that you can learn 3d so you can learn houdini so uh on that side then it's also equally important to have a strong portfolio so emily emily matched that and uh you know we we had the interview and well like here she is very cool um there's a talking about doing your own kind of personal projects as well as professional work um talk about the value of doing personal projects alongside professional work do you want to speak to um what you learn by by sort of being um being your own client for jobs as opposed to just doing work that comes in uh assigned to you at a studio uh you know the perk of doing your own project is you can do whatever you want and you can even do things that you're not specializing like like right now i want to learn more about grooming and that's i've never do grooming my work you know because that's not why i specialize in and it's nice for you to not only like learn what you specialize in but learn about cg in general because those at the end will actually help you in your job if you learn more about how lighting can make them can comp for example which is really good for effects you can learn how to copy your effects and then your effects actually look nicer so when you do personal project it's for me it's always about doing something that you enjoy it's no there's no goal apart from learning and having fun or else you know just go to sleep you know so it's about enjoying your time doing it and then hopefully you get something that you can apply for your job as well yeah i know the one thing um it can be easy uh when you're doing your own projects you're kind of your own client who's giving yourself your own tasks it's easy to want to stay within your own sort of comfort bubble and not push yourself that's one thing when you have a client feeding you work they're always they're feeding you god knows what whatever kind of crazy projects but um any advice for um how to challenge yourself and um be to be willing to break your comfort bubble uh yeah so one thing to do is uh post it online uh because when even before you finish it you can post process then you will feel i don't know how you feel but i'll feel the need to finish it because everyone's watching uh so that's i think that's how i force myself to get our comfort zone and um you know share with your friends as well and what i do with my friend is so my best friend is also houdini artist and she always tells me what she wants to do and i feel like oh i should do that as well and then we would just make each other do things that we are comfortable with but not the other person and then you know and then we can learn from each other as well and um yeah i think stepping off comfort zone it's it's up to you there's no way to do it it's just more like you sit down and go okay i need to do something different now and then do it and don't care if it looks bad um because you can just do it again and it will look nicer next time oh very nice um there were a number of questions about uh learning houdini getting into houdini um because right now everybody sees uh you as a person who can just play it like a piano and you can make music with it but um well i mean i i know you're maybe shaking your head because every artist is aware of what our own shortcomings are now we're acutely aware of what we feel like we don't know but obviously you are very uh you are very comfortable in the software very accomplished in the software but that's just what we see now it's maybe hard to see the journey you made to get here as someone who just first opened it up i know you spoke to that a little bit but um any advice on someone um again you spoke to this a bit but uh who sees this maybe they coming from maya or blender or something else they're like wow this is a pretty amazing tool uh any advice on uh your first time opening up houdini because it's a very different package um any advice on how to kind of get your brain going in that direction yeah so um i also used maya first um so i i can see the the struggle and i think it's uh to begin with it's do what you again is what you want to do so if you are more like a modeler then you should do procedural modeling first because that means not only you have got actual knowledge of how geometry works because modeling is about you know looking at the details and references and stuff so you're not jumping in a completely new area with the new software and i think with the way houdini is going you can do more than just effects now you can do modeling you can do a lot of game stuff and you can maybe not sculpting but um definitely a lot of different areas that you can start with that's comfortable to you and in terms of uh i guess it is quite different because it's node-based but that's just something that it will come with time but it's about doing projects that uh you're interested in that will i think that will really help very nice um there was a question uh dick directed towards noman is houdini training offered as any part of your courses either online or the programs uh yes we do offer a good um a wide variety of unique classes we offer houdini one through four so it we start you off um assuming you don't know houdini we open it up and show you how to use it um getting into all the various solvers uh until you're now designing your own kind of little uh production style shots um we do specialized classes in uh liquid simulation uh we have a vfx design class which pushes you uh very creatively in the software to make sure you're not just doing i mean um yes you wanna be able to do the bread and butter of explosions and fire and liquid but also uh it's such an amazing creative tool that can do so much um that we wanna make sure that you are using it in kind of unexpected creative direction so nolman does offer a um uh again a good uh depth of uh houdini education and one thing i'll maybe take this back um beyond just to make the conversation not just about how to push the buttons in houdini but being an artist in houdini because obviously it's more than just do you know how to work the nodes but one of the things you try to do at nomen is make sure that you're bringing an artistic eye uh to the work and a um a sensibility for production kind of how to use this in a pragmatic sense so um anything you want to speak to about um uh this is obviously very technical but also at the end of the day you're an artist you're making a beautiful image so um anything you want to speak to about sort of maintaining your sense of uh artistry in the face of all these uh giant node trees [Music] yeah does that you see what i'm saying you know the idea of how to um you know balance the technical side of things with um you still you know is it difficult to get too caught up in the technical part of it and lose sight of the the artistry do you feel uh no i i i i i always see myself as both like in between technical and artistic and uh the way with houdini is it's you have an image in your head that you want to achieve and you're just figuring out how to do a way where you know it's non-destructive you can go back and change things and i don't know it's i don't think i think houdini is good for balancing the two and especially with um uh you know you can use all these uh like external renderer as well uh which uh if you're comfortable with doing things in retrieving maya then you can do that in houdini and it you know you can achieve the same image just with a different method um so no i don't yeah it's no no i i agree i think i i'm on the same page as you that's something that i hear um a lot of young artists say as well i'm an artist but i don't i'm not technical and i don't necessarily see that there has to be a difference between those that it's just um it's a more powerful tool at your disposal that can you can make such a amazing impossible things but it's still just at the end of the day it's a tool yeah and also i think eugene is you you're still even though it's technical you're still artistically thinking the solution you know you're still being creative with your solution which i think is also an art you know it's a creative thing so yeah awesome um so how about this talking about uh the um uh process of getting your brain set up to get into houdini and become an artist but also you need some equipment so rob anything um uh talk about um uh you know anything recommended for artists getting into the industry kind of maybe entry-level things what they would need to um to get their feet wet in this well yeah sure um well it really depends on on what they're wanting to do i mean um you know there are obviously a lot of factors whether or not um you know what your budget obviously is the the type of work that you're ultimately wanting to do and whatnot and like the the workstation or the mobile workstation that that emily is working on which actually she's got the first one out in the wild right now um they're not even available until next week believe it or not it's when they when they're actually publicly available but um depending on what you want to do and what your budget is obviously i mean it's kind of asking like how long is a piece of string it's as long as it is so um you know you can start off with um you know lower-end graphics or a lower-end cpu option obviously um you're still going to be able to get the work done it's just it's it's just one of those things where it's you can go as as big and broad as you want so like the the system that that emily's running on you can either go with an i9 or a xeon processor or a one of the new rtx ampere based uh a 2000 four thousand or five thousand gpus but there's also um uh 30 70 and 30 80 options as well so it really there's a lot of flexibility and then also beyond just that of the the p1 that she's working on there's a full range of desktop and mobile workstations that pretty much fit the requirement of you know any artist whether they're just starting out or they're you know going through a proper education facility like that of gnomon or they've entered into the professional workspace and working at a large studio all right fantastic um well i think maybe uh yes she gets to keep it gets everyone safe that's always the nice perk of the job is that you get to actually keep the hardware when you're done um you know the heart again it's as as amazing as the uh the software and the hardware are uh it's only as good as the artist that gets to drive it so um you know it's the union of all the things you get the amazing tool the amazing hardware but it's it's the user at the end of the day who gets to make the pretty picture out of it so um any uh any final thoughts you all want to share with us uh last bits of uh parting wisdom uh for the audience out there than great job emily i'm i'm i'm humbled every time i see an artist at work i mean it's it's it's truly impressive to watch how they uh go about tackling problems but also it's really fascinating to learn um about their journey throughout the industry and how they've gotten to where they are today and uh and their enthusiasm you know i mean emily's enthusiastic about her learning and where she's taking her her craft and it's it's it's really cool yeah agreed and i i have to admit i'm always a sucker for the uh the houdini um demos that come out seeing all the new insane features um it's just it's a it's a great bit of a sort of gas to throw on your fire to get you going so uh you know thank you fiona for continuing to produce those those are always a thrill to see when they come out and thanks to all the interns such as yourself for uh helping make that happen um all right so uh again thank you to uh fianna rob and to emily um thank you for this amazing presentation and uh thanks to all of you uh watching this will be again going up on uh twitch and youtube in our archives here very soon and uh thank you uh to miranda who's there behind the scenes plugging in with this she's sort of the unsung hero and helps keep all this going um all right thank you and uh good night from noman thank you

Channel: Gnomon

Views: 2,620

Rating: 4.9649124 out of 5

Keywords: gnomon, gnomon school, vfx, visual effects, cg, cgi, computer generated graphics, computer generated, computer generated effects, animation, cg effects, zbrush, cg science, gnomon event, 3d, fx, effects, shorts, gfx, motion, capture, mocap, computer, digital, art, modeling, arnold renderer, nuke, maya, compositing, houdini, sidefx, houdini tutorial, emily fung, lion king, dumbo

Id: LkTwXo6aihA

Length: 114min 8sec (6848 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021