Top 10 Reasons for Game Artists to Learn Houdini | Robert Magee | Houdini HIVE Education + Studi...

foreign [Applause] McGee I work at side effects software I've been there for 20 years now and a lot of that time has been spent working on educational material to help artists get up and running with Houdini I think you know we tutorials are great because they show you how to do it but they don't particularly tell you why why am I learning this why why should I take the time to do this so today we're going to focus a little bit on that so before we we we get into the top ten um let's just talk about procedural game art and what kinds of things are people out there doing with Houdini so environments uh is one key area and uh you can see some excellent work by artists out in the community here this is using our terrain tools train tools are very uh procedural as you layer um you know Hills and noise and all these things together to get a final result and then these results go very well nicely out into game engine such as unreal uh this is the Matrix project that um epic put out about a year ago uh and it relied very heavily actually on Houdini for the city building uh aspect of this uh the city can be broken down into tons and tons of little points and those points have attributes and those attributes allowed the assignment of the proper piece of geometry later in the game engine Houdini's job was to manage all that to make sure that the right pieces were in the right place and that they were getting the results that they wanted and you know they would process a lot of stuff in Houdini look at it organize it and then spit that out to the next result so uh you can see the scale at which you can go when you do procedural things uh hiridini now another area is interactive assets so with the other projects uh or you saw that the points were created and they sort of automatically plugged in with interactive assets you're actually letting the artists work with an asset in an environment like a level which makes sense to finish the project so let's take a look so here's uh Far Cry is a a project that uses a lot of Houdini and here's a little snippet of their workflow where they simply go into their level designer and they say well we want to draw a line along here and then when they finish they bring up a menu and they say what do we want we want a road do we want a power line a cliff they want a fence now this is actually using Houdini under the hood processes that instruction and builds a fence for them and that's using a technology called Houdini engine which we'll talk a lot a little bit later so that's pretty exciting so you're empowering the game artist to work with an extremely friendly tool as you saw all it was was a line pick off a menu and you get a result that is the kind of thing that's possible when you build a pipeline with Houdini um neon giant is another company that created this game called the ascent which is incredibly rich in its detail and a lot of it is procedural assets generated using Houdini and here you are in the game editor and you see them starting to take a what's called a Houdini digital asset it's been brought in with the Houdini engine and they can go and they can play around with configurations and as they do that the asset generates the results so you know you can imagine you probably all modeled stuff for your game before it wasn't a matter of moving a few boxes around it was a lot of work with a procedural asset you you organize that work so you you build a tool at the beginning and then after that uh your level designers I did that in New York a lot um your level designers can go um crazy building stuff and they they're not modeling they're just saying I'm building a wall I'm building a a chair a table whatever because they've got the asset to do that uh and look at the richness they were able to create with a relatively small team because they are working with proceduralism to enhance what they what they do uh here's a nice uh example by an artist which emphasized the idea of iterative design is as you're working on things you want to explore well what about this option what about that um that's really hard to do if you have to go back to the modeling Department every time you change your mind but with a procedural asset you can be making creative decisions on the fly in the level editor using these procedural assets um and here there's a cobweb tool so again imagine modeling a cobweb every somebody every time somebody needs that if you're in a haunted house uh game that's going to be a little bit daunting but if you have a tool that will take care of that for you where you can just by changing with some parameters and interactively placing it you get that result automatically you're really helping your team be more efficient and achieve more and like I said it's about iterations about let's explore different options do we want it this way do we want it that way all of that sort of um creative process that that that that aspect of the creative process is critical to you getting the best result for your for your game so you're not stuck with what you happen to model early on in the process you're making creative decisions right up to the nth degree so another area is uh real-time effects so used to be that a game engine would be fairly Limited at what they could do from an effects level you'd get a couple little particles here and there meanwhile Houdini's off making movies with some incredible visual effects at scale and size and complexity that you are never going to see that in a game but there are Pathways and those pathways are starting to open up to get that stuff from the traditional Houdini way of working into the game so here's an example of one and this one actually has a tutorial on the website you can follow and it brings in destruction effects it brings in particle effects and some smoke so there's about three or four different real-time effects techniques all used to create this one example so lots of interesting possibilities there uh here's some fire brought in running in real time you can move around the space and and that fire is there in the scene um and and the tools necessary to get that in uh are are there and we're going to talk a little bit about later about how you get this stuff in to the game using Houdini character effects is something that's growing in in this space and their Grooms can sometimes be taken into games and Houdini's got a great set of grooming tools to prepare for this kind of thing um there's a character you know again do you take it in as is into the game no it needs some conversion maybe from the actual lines into cards but the key is there is a pathway for getting these kinds of things into games adding that level of complexity although I think unreal now has bouncing hair so you know you plug into that and you're all set to go and here's another fun one from an artist in the community okay so let's start talking about the top 10 reasons you should be learning Houdini to fit into this world so the first thing is the benefits of going procedural if you're choosing Houdini you're probably understand the idea that procedural is at the core of things and what exactly does that mean there's lots of things out there that are growing with I've got a node workflow or I've got you know there's there's procedural nodes with blueprint and unreal so you're probably already comfortable with the concept of a node-based procedural solution the thing about Houdini is that node-based approach is everywhere within the software and at a very low level it's been there since we first created it 20 odd years ago so what that means is that there there's lots of possibilities and flow that Houdini can do that just nobody's really figured that out yet so what are your goals as a game artist well you're trying to build a compelling game experience you want to Art direct all aspects of your game so you get the best result for your your players and you need the game art to be playable which means it can't slow the game down it has to be efficient and optimized these are all things that proceduralism can help you with and it can also help you face some challenges things like repetitive tasks that consume time you know there was an independent game artist he was using Houdini a few years ago he's building this level which had like 60 bridges that all had to look more or less the same he just needed one tool to lay out those 60 Bridges and he was good to go so imagine if he had had to model each one of those one by one by one by one wouldn't have made sense larger worlds can overwhelm teams in the new world people are expecting you know metaverse level you know environments with tons of realistic detail and all this well that's not going to be done by hand by anything less than a team of a thousand so how do you Pare that down and the procedural Solutions allow you to create that that depth and richness to the world that you're creating without you know making the things impossible for everyone um and last minute changes can be costly so what happens is you're often locked down to your early decisions because you look at the idea of going back and redoing the work and say there's no no way I'm going back through all the steps I had to do to get what this here even though I don't like the result here I don't want to take those steps to get there so last minute change their costly and these again are things that Houdini can help you with and we'll talk a little bit about that as we go along Houdini's proceduralism and based on the idea of nodes that store creative decisions networks that create a non-destructive flow of data and flexible interconnections ways of wiring and switching and and doing things within the network and also the idea of assets where you can take that Network and collapse it into a single node um put friendly tools up at the top and feed it into a larger Pipeline and we'll talk about that that's the Houdini engine stuff like the fence that we saw earlier so here here's an example of a procedural tool built in Houdini and this is a cable tool and this is a snippet sped up from a tutorial that we have on our website from Project Titan we'll talk about project Titan later so if you want to learn this this is going too fast but you can actually follow a normal pace through the website so what this artist has done is they've created a line they've resampled it they've swept it so now we've got six lines now they've taken the circle that they've swept along there and they're using a mountain to sort of make it a little bit you know not perfectly symmetrical that's kind of noise and natural look is one of the things that allows Houdini to be procedural without everything looking all regimented and straight lined um and so now that what he's doing here is something really interesting which is he's looking at the distance relationship between the points that he's created there and looking at the rest length and going to use that to actually determine the radius of the cables so that allows him to create some variation in the cable radius without actually doing it by hand so as you can see as he adds more points goes back to the uh this and change that around you see the radius of the circles changes based on the relationship to each other and this is where procedural systems are great because you know they solve a problem that would have occurred if he had just made the radius the same for all of them because they would have bumped and overlapped and he solved that problem now he's plugging in a Vellum solver to get basically the drooping of the cables so selecting the end points and you can do that procedurally so you grab the end points give them a name put them in a group and once you've got them in a group you can say use those as the pin points and there we go then you could say well let's wrap some other cables around the first set of cables and then we'll be able to drape that and maybe get a more interesting result so it's another nice thing about procedural assets Houdini is you can start out simple with an idea and then just start layer more and more complexity on top of that to get a more and more realistic result and so here he's wiring all this together setting up groups for small cables and big cables groups help organize things down the line and there we go and already it's looking much more natural much more interesting than it was looking uh just with a few three or four cables up at the beginning so the key things to take away here is number one is everything he did created a node and that node is essentially the recipe for this this cable which means he can repeat it and that we're going to get to that in a bit uh it also is great because he can share it with other people who can look at the nodes and the nodes become you know something that people can learn from and say well I want to do something similar but I'm going to go do it a different way so but it's great to have somebody else's work so you're building Knowledge from other people and we'll talk about that building of knowledge later when we talk about some of the resources that we make available for students so the next thing is this idea of wrapping this up making an asset out of it so I got a bunch of nodes I collapsed it into a single node with the original nodes inside it and this is done in the interface this is we're not writing code here this is just select some nodes and collapse and then we say well let's promote parameters from those nodes to create a high level interface the nodes inside this might have hundreds of parameters of which you don't need to touch most of them but there might be five or six key parameters that if you promote them up you have control of this thing what's neat is when you promote them up you can also change their name so something that might have had a very esoteric name down below you can give a very friendly name like number of cables you know and it just works now once you do that you can also do other things like add custom parameters inputs handles even embedded geometry and texture so if I'm going to share this amongst a team I don't want references to some file on disk to be broken so if I can embed some of the geometry that I need to use inside the asset then it's going to go along with it when I share that and once I have that I have a tool that is effectively a new tool within Houdini so what that means is that the digital asset Works inside Houdini just like any other node in Houdini and as a matter of fact many of the tools in Houdini are actually digital assets created by our developers to sort of wrap a high higher level interface over what would otherwise be maybe complexity that we don't need to see we're also going to talk about other ways that people make these kinds of digital assets we're going to talk about side effects Labs where these kinds of assets are created and they function within Houdini just like any other tools that's pretty exciting once you've got your high level interface when the Tool is loaded back in you can manipulate that high level interface and and you and the flow of data through the network gives you the result that you need so let's look at that with this cable so we're going to take all these nodes and we're going to collapse them into a single subnet and then we're going to make them into a digital asset we're going to give it a name or a version number and this stores the digital asset on disk this is what makes it shareable it's not stuck in your scene file it's actually on disk it'll then reference back into this scene while I tinker with it and then later it'll be something I can pass along to other people so I create a couple inputs because I want one input to be a curve and one to be Collision geometry for the Vellum Sim so I'll just put some test things in here so I've got a line to represent the cable and I've got a box to represent the collisions and we're going to actually later in on unreal those are going to get assigned um directly so now we go in and we look at these different parts of the of the tool and we say well what do we need to promote so we create some folders up above and then we start just literally dragging dropping parameters up so I am building a tool that normally you'd have to go to a developer and say can you build me a tool and it would all get coded and so on you're doing that by hand as an artist and the fact that artists can do this that's a critical concept and idea and something that we'll talk a little bit more later and there you go so there's a whole bunch of parameters we can reset the Sim play with the the different parameters so only the things that got were important got promoted and this tool is now functioning and can be handed off to artists to work with in in a in the context so the next thing we're going to talk about is strong connections to Unreal to game engines in general but we're I think the example I have here is an unreal one so we have that asset we created earlier and we say well you know what I'd really like to bring that into unreal well that assets a bunch of Houdini nodes how's that going to go into unreal well we built something a few years ago called Houdini engine and it's a plug-in for host applications such as unreal that when you bring a digital asset in engine will recognize that asset go to the Houdini libraries cook the nodes and deliver the results to the host application so that high level interface we built earlier that actually becomes available within unreal and you can Tinker with the sliders and move things around and it'll just go off and cook it again and give the result back so this is pretty exciting because you know you might be in a situation where like okay I can train three people to use Houdini but there's no way I'm training my team of 20 people to use Houdini so the two people build tools and the 20 people use those tools within unreal and they're good to go and the license that's needed to run that within unreal we've now we've recently made that free for Studio so they can have as many of those licenses within the studios possible as students or Indie users you have access to those kinds of licenses as well so somebody could sit down at a box with unreal and they just need uh an engine license and they're able to do this kind of work without even knowing about Houdini Houdini is not even part of the picture for them it is they just don't know it and this also works in other applications Maya Unity 3D Studio Max we also have plugins there so let's look at the cable tool inside unreal so it doesn't do anything right now because we need an input curve so we bring an input curve in so this is one of unreal's Curves and when you have one of those you just you can move the points around and then press the ALT key to add points to it and we get around get a nice little thing like this so then we say okay we want to simulate that and it's going through the floor that's because we have to assign the all this geometry to that second input so we assign that to the second input and work almost good to go problem is we're getting these weird bubbles which wouldn't make sense it was an electrical cable um so what we do is something called session sync and session sync will take everything you have in unreal and move it over to Houdini so that you can start to debug what you were doing and see why is this not working so we go into the asset and we say what could this possibly be and what we realize is that when we did that um the radius of the curve based on the distance the rest length we forgot that when this curve goes around a sharp angle like that there's a big distance in there and that's forcing the P scale to be very high so we've got to change it to resample it so it's more even and as a matter of fact we're also going to just smooth it we didn't really want sort of right angles anyway so now there we go we got the problem solved so we go in and we've tested that out and then we can start to also just continue to enhance and improve things reset make sure that works and you know this might be a time to go back and there we go uh now we can move this around and we're not getting any of those bubbles so as you're working on these assets session sync is a great way of going back and forth and making sure that your tool is doing what it's supposed to be doing some of the other things you might want to do are add materials so you can assign take an unreal material if you have its path and just plug that in and now that is assigned to there we could also go through and say well let's do one for the big cables and one for the small cables and actually assign different materials there and now I'm getting different materials on there so that capability is built right into the asset now so that it will pull on those materials automatically and here's the same asset in a more complex version of the project Titan scene where exactly the same asset is being used but now we're in context a level designer is in context saying I need a cable and this is where it's going to go and this is how it's going to work and this is how it's going to collide with the surrounding geometry all that is happening here this is a much better way of working than trying to predetermine what kind of cable I need and where is it going to go and get a modeler to do it and then if you you know how dare I ask for changes because they're going to get angry at me um but now a level designer can just do this and be satisfied that they're getting the best result possible so FR means that artists have the capacity to build their own tools this is very important because who knows better what the needs of the art team are than another artist so if an artist can take this and let's just go and start look at this so the benefits are if an artist can build their own tools they've got creative control it's easier to iterate by using the tool going ah it's not what I want try something else go you know try something else have it tested by somebody try something else that communication line is going to be tighter than if it had to go through an R D team um scalability often you can build an asset that solves a smaller problem but you can then continue to layer and layer uh sophisticated controls into it and suddenly it's solving a big problem um live assets work deep into production we talked about that as a problem earlier well what if you get to the near the end of the game and well an example I was told once was a game that had a roller coaster they had a final review and everyone's like it's fantastic I just wish the roller coaster was like 20 percent taller and the Houdini artist goes excuse me goes off in the other room comes back 10 minutes later and says okay refresh the game boom he had it all worked out so that he could just change that and procedurally everything would happen and they got what they wanted and they moved on again something you wouldn't be able to do without a procedural solution at your disposal some of the other benefits pipeline wise to these kinds of assets are you can pull build optimization inside the asset so you know what you need you need Collision geometry you need a level of detail you need you know poly counts of a certain you know want to control the polygon counts you might have a situation where okay there's a tunnel and I need to go through the tunnel so I've got to make sure it's the right radius no matter what if you're doing a procedural asset you control all that the person who let's just say a more senior person who knows what those requirements are can build that into the tool and the results just happen um and so that allows you to know because I mean that's always the fear is I'm going to put down one of these procedural assets and then it's going to ruin the game and I'm going to have to come back and do it the old-fashioned way no the reality is you build those capabilities into the asset you put it down you press play and it works and that's that's one of the benefits of working with procedural assets also you can create more with smaller teams because you know not everyone is going through all the stages for every asset you're able to build a tool give it to people and they're just deployed as they need it all good to go so here's uh now project Titan I'll talk again I mentioned a few times we have this internal project that we did with the help of members from the Houdini community and it allowed us to sort of do a test of a really intense scenario uh and out of that came a whole bunch of tutorials and assets and things to share with the community and here are some of the tools that uh that that are a result of that so here's a a railing tool that you just draw a curve and you've got yourself a railing um this one's a fun one so I've got to populate the inner part of this barge so instead of putting a whole bunch of boxes down and laying them out what I can do is just put one box down plug that into a tool that will then populate that one box with a whole bunch of stuff again stuff that I've predetermined as a senior designer so my artists are taking that plugging in the things you know saying go uh and then they just uncheck a couple things and there you go they've got themselves a box full of things I want it longer just refresh that okay now I've got it longer yeah there we go so you know a lot of work that would have required an artist to spend a day or a half a day or or something like that is just like seconds because these tools help you with the work that you're doing here's a building asset you know I mean you'd assume that buildings are something you know I'm gonna have to build that by hand it's going to be tons of work and so on uh we have building assets and actually some of these are in side effects labs and this is sort of an enhanced version of what side of X labs are you going to say well this is the number of stories this is the architecture I'm plugging into it and how many windows do I want air conditioners do I want a central Archway all those decisions are made at the asset level and these are digital assets Houdini digital assets promoted to Houdini sort of promoted to Unreal as uh through Houdini engine and that parameter interface is there to make all these creative decisions and um I think this is sort of an entrance way to go in front of that staircase I mean staircases modeling staircases is a pain and it's just it's not it's not fun you know rise and run and how far do I go and you know so having a procedural asset that solves that problem for you is that's a pretty big deal bigger deal than it maybe looks here on the screen uh scaffolding I mean look at how complex the geometry is to this and the idea that somebody was able to build a system where all they have to do is pull on some sliders and there you go I've got my scaffolding and again if I don't like to pull the slider route I can say okay well let me use some white boxes and sort of block it out and once I block it out it'll just get filled with with scaffolding so pointed at the Box and so on and this is the other thing that's cool about these tools is you can build multiple couple different interface approaches because your artists don't all work the same way so you can say well you like to white box things we got a route for you you like to pull on sliders we got a root for you you like to draw curves we got a root for you and that can be built into the tool so here we are just white boxing a little wing off to the side and uh there we go so that's a lot of sophistication to put down I mean I know I sped it up but I didn't speed it up that much uh that's a lot of sophistication in a pretty short time and uh foliage so here we have uh we want to put some IV on this so we just select the geometry and you know the leaves sort of wrap itself around there and I think these are actual Ivy so you've got wire um the branches and so on some of it's hanging now you get a little bit of physics you notice actually moves a little bit in the game so some of that's built in a little agitation there and I think you can say how much the wind is or something and it'll agitate it now one of the I guess one of the things I should point out is that the proceduralism is here in the game editor it is not workable at runtime so I can't in my game have a you know a slider that I pull in my my building gets bigger um we don't work at that level at runtime it's designed for the artist building the game once you finish and you press play to go make the game these become normal game assets and their proceduralism is not part of the picture anymore your next question is well can you make it work at runtime and of course we're always thinking about that but at the moment that would be sort of porting all of Houdini into unreal and that's not going to happen tomorrow um so we talked about artists making tools for other artists well we do that ourselves we have the side effects Labs tools um Danica earlier gave a longer talk about these tools and they are specifically designed to streamline workflow but with us as the TDS so we go and say well what what does the community need Let's help the community uh with that so side effects lab is available if you go to the product menu uh side effects Labs we have a page that has some information about it as well as links to the documentation as well as to the art station page and the roadmap so if you go to the product menu that's where you can sort of find everything and then from there you can go and get the specific details so here are some of the tools that are available in this in this world ability to go to the map box app and and bring information in and turn into geometry and Houdini so you know lots of realism fast with real world data um osm data uh including buildings and sort of bringing trained data and osm data and sort of merging that together to get started on a realistic level we also have the tree tools so there's tools within Houdini to build up trees that you can then prepare for a game or put into a real time or into a into a rendered project as well and you can get a wide variety of different trees from that using the various settings and so on that are there so here's the network of that first tree so there's a whole bunch of trunk generators Branch generators Leaf generators and then you just plug all this in and get the result that you want and then you can then output that as you need and here's the same tools used to do something a little bit more more uh underwater-ish this is an interesting tool that's in Labs it's the rope tool specifically designed to wrap things with rope so if you need that in your game we gotcha so here is an object and the asset just goes and you just create intersecting planes and it uses those intersecting planes you notice that it wraps the rope and it also wraps the rope that came first so if you put two robes down the wano wrap around the other and then you can put some Physics in to have them drop and sort of connect there so very specific tool it's a really good example and this of course comes to the other idea but all these tools whether it be the Titan tools the side effects lab tools and so on we don't lock them down and hide our secrets from anyone every one of these tools can be opened up by you and tinkered with so if you want to become a tool Builder you can you have lots of examples to download explore open up see what they did see how they did it um and and even within your own team as you build tools you know if you take a little bit of time to annotate some of your networks you can be sharing with each other and so knowledge gets built as opposed to knowledge starting from scratch every time somebody does something this is a community effort not just an individual effort so real-time effects so we talked earlier about the fact that real-time effects is a growing thing in games there's a level of sophistication in there so that brings you to Houdini's traditional tools like the pyrofx tools for doing really sophisticated explosions and so on so now we can take those and flip those out and there are some side effects lab tools to help convert that into something that we can use uh within a game engine so here we see one of those explosions inside unreal and we're tinkering with the lighting of it so there's even chance to massage it and get it looking the way you want it within the game engine and here's in the game engine that expl an explosion going there as well so if you need that level of realism in your game then that's certainly a possibility uh with these tools and here's that fire we had the windmill earlier so this is the same sort of fire tools now um this fire example is actually available in a section of Houdini called the Content Library which I'm going to talk about a little later which is a place you can also go to download assets and Sample scene files and things that you might want to explore and dig deeper into so again we make it and we share it and and that allows the community to grow their knowledge uh this is something that's been animated and using deformations and so on in Houdini you're like well how's this going to a game engine well using a technique called vertex animation textures this can actually be taken to a game engine and the vertex animation textures is actually something that it's a feature of unreal but Houdini has some very unique ways of plugging into it and has even solved some of the issues about the way things rotate and Arc through space and so on so our solution allows you to get there faster you can use standard Houdini destruction tools to get started and then result in something that can be plugged into a game now I have had people say well I bring it into the game but but how does how does it interact with the game well then you add some blueprints in for it'll start animating at a certain point based on a certain situation and you know you can make that work and here's another this is also available as part of a tutorial which is uh you know destruction um and various other things are plugging into the Niagara system within unreal we plug into that very well so the we've got a few side effects Labs tutorials that teach you all the different aspects of that so real-time effects are part of the picture now and certainly something worth learning and Houdini is a great tool for that because we got some pretty good VFX tools so the next thing we're going to talk about is you might want to use Houdini to help optimize your game art so you might have a situation where you're I know 3D scanning tons of geometry that you want to put into your game but most of it comes out a little nasty so how do I get that into my game in a way that it's not going to mess up my game so what you can do in Houdini so this is a a 3D model of a sculpture and so the way that that was done was taking the photogrammetry running it through a Alice Vision plug-in so that you're literally doing the capturing here in Houdini and then running through a network to clean it up poly reduce it clean up get rid of small parts and then some specific things that unreal needs to get that geometry exactly what it what it what it wants so we'll just take a look at that happening here so if we go through the network we can go let's say to the top node and there we go go to the top node and this is what comes in initially there's all the photographs there that were used to create it then we can straighten it up match its size just get it perfectly aligned let's clip the bottom part there and then we're gonna there's a few little pieces left over so let's delete small parts so there's that let's do a poly reduction 25 poly reduction so we have nodes for that and of course what's important about all this is one again once I have these nodes I have a recipe so I can take another bunch of photographs and plug it through the system and take another set of photographs and plug it through the system so I'm not doing this work over and over and over again I've got a system that allows me to do it efficiently through a procedural solution and then set the scale for unreal and then we can either rbj out it or fbx out you know or put it into a digital asset you can decide which then leads to something called PDG which is automation made easy so the idea here is that okay if these networks get big enough in Houdini they might take a little while to process maybe the whole network to do it all the complexity you're asking it to do maybe it takes 20 minutes or a half an hour maybe an hour it's too bad you're tied to one computer but with PDG you're not what happens with PDG is everything you ask it to do it breaks down into little tasks and then what it does is you get something called a scheduler and you say well let's assign those tasks to let's say my my computers three of my computer's core so it's going to motor through those things as you can see over there seven have been completed three tasks are on the go 70 to go but you say you know what instead of just using three let's use 11. well now it's going to motor through that a little faster because it's using 11 of my cores instead of three and it's going to go through and and and and figure that out and of course I have probably a multiple nodes so I have to motor through all those different nodes well if I use a different scheduler like deadline now I can plug into a compute Farm or maybe the cloud now I might have 50 computers or 100 computers now I'm going even I'm not locked to my computer anymore I'm free because all that works going off being done somewhere else and then delivering me the results and one of the neat things is you can actually have PDG nodes inside digital assets so that you're in unreal and you say press that button and it's going to go off and distribute all the work and the results will show up right there in unreal which is pretty exciting stuff and one of the things with PDG stands for procedural dependency graph so one of the things is that if you did something and let's say you changed one little thing over here and it doesn't affect everything but it affects some of the stuff going on Peg is smart enough to say I'm only going to update the few things that needed to be fixed I'm going to not update the things that don't so it's very good for iterations because you're not redoing that work over and over again you're sort of there's smarts built into it so here's an example um this is a local scheduler I'm going to put down a node called file pattern I'm going to go to a directory and put a star there and say get me everything in that directory which currently is only four models so four models are being imported in so that's fairly simple task now I'm going to go in and I'm going to say run a digital asset that will brickify them turn them into Lego versions of themselves and then assign a texture map to it I run through that and there we go thing is they're all the same texture map I don't want that so I'm going to do a second file pattern that goes into a texture folder and has corresponding textures for each one of the models I then go in and partition them together and what that will do is they'll get basically paralyzed together so each texture map in each model will be joined together then I go to the digital asset and initially it's not going to do what I want because what I need to do is go to the texture map here and say give you the PDG input.1 which is the texture map and now when I process it I get there we go so that's great I've got this working but I want to share this with my supervisor so what I'm going to do is I want to render it all the examples so I set up a little scene here and I'm going to do at PDG index so I'm going to get one image for every thing that comes through run that through and now I'm getting images for each one of these now what I do is I say bring them together and then we're going to run turn that into a mosaic and there we go we get a result and now I can hand this to my supervisor he can review all of them and go okay job done so this is pretty good but I mean with four of them is that a big deal okay well what if it was 12 of them what if it was more of them if it was more of them suddenly the idea of going to the cloud going to the compute Farm makes a lot of sense and you are able to get results much faster because you've automated them instead of trying to do everything by hand so let's go back to optimizing the geometry that we had from from the Alice Vision so we're bringing all that in and we're optimizing it imagine if you could take thousands of photographs all in folders go through them all and build the models and render them out to show to the team decide which ones we want to use that's the kind of thing that's possible with PDG and why it's worth considering and I know it's a little scary because you got to go to the compute farm and I know resources on the farm are you know in schools sometimes there isn't a lot of space on those compute farms for things but if you can find a way to Tinker with it and build that skill set there's a lot of Studios that would appreciate your ability to understand how PDG works and this is an example specifically going to uh unreal so with the complexity going on with nanite now um there will definitely be a need for processing models and getting them prepared for nanite and that's the kind of thing that again ptg would be very good for so the next thing I'm going to talk about is something called Solaris which is Houdini's gateway to USD how many people have heard of USD okay so the word's getting around now USD has not up till now been a game solution it's been primarily used in film and TV uh but unreal is improving their support for it as each version goes forward and because of that uh it is becoming a viable option for laying things out and then putting them into a game so Solaris is a context within Houdini which we call lops for sort of lighting operators and it's a context built around USD so once you bring something into lops it is USD and from there we can then spit it out as USD or do things with it and and then send it off to the right place USD is universal scene description it's an open source source initiative by Pixar uh and Houdini has a whole bunch of layout tools referencing instancing tools and things that allow us to interact with it in a very positive way so here's just an exam this is It's way more complex than this but I'm trying to talk about the benefits just to some level so a USD shot might include layout with assets animation with specific characters and everything's broken down into individual little files and they're sort of referenced into this shot effects could be in there lighting and cameras are also part of that description which could be very helpful for for things and then I go off to do another shot and in this case I don't have to worry about the layout the layout's already created so I'm just going to reference in the one that already exists and the same with the lighting I like the lighting I'm just going to keep that but I need new characters and maybe there's some new effects in there so what happens is a lot more sharing and there's a hierarchical relationship between things within USD which is very powerful and I am scratching the surface of the possibilities because you can have an object like a table and then you can layer another table that's fall into the ground on top of it with the same name the first one goes away the second one takes over some people describe uh USD as it's like the layering in Photoshop but with 3D objects so some really interesting possibilities of how those layer and and and and get to work so one two one great tutorial that just showed up on our our website recently was this scene an ice environment scene it's done by Adrian Lambert who works at ilm and he took this created it did all the layout stuff in Houdini and then actually took it out to USD or sorry took it out using USD to Unreal and so he sort of beginning it's like the beginning of what could be a gamer's pipeline for doing some layout um and so this is all the elements that he had in his scene he has all the grass the trees the the props and so on and they're all sort of layered in there and as you can see lighting is a big part of this in this case he's rendering with Karma the built-in render that Houdini has but of course those same lights and cameras would go out USD open up and unreal and and you'd be able to just carry forward from there so this is a super fast just skim through of some of his tutorial obviously you'd have to go do the actual tutorial to get all the Gory details but he's taking some Mega scan models bringing them into something we call the component Builder which allows you to create class A USD files with materials assigned properly variants set up properly so you can have different variations of the same asset and as well as anything else that you need so he's done that material X I set it up there to work with um with our render Karma and um and there you go and then he's exploring the different ways of bringing that back in so you've got referencing you can reference something back in you can sub-layer it which is more of a USD concept you can also uh use a layout brush where you can sort of just brush in the area that you want to put things and it's going to lay it out automatically with instancing so this is just a quick scan you can bring in a bunch of objects like this and then use physics to drop them down and so that you're not using physics as an animation thing but as a layout thing um here's a forest a lot of instancing in here fairly sophisticated um system that he's built and uh he explores that again much slower than I've got here but then you can go around and paint in some some grass and and flush out the scene and get what you want then you've got the leaves the leaves are a big element in his so he's got a whole bunch of variants and then he can use those through an instancer to just go all over the place and rotate and and get set up then he moves into the lighting phase starts setting up his lighting for the shot and exploring that right here in the viewport so it's not rendering it's not something he does down the line we have the karma xbu now which is GPU based or it's a hybrid GPU so you can get some really fast feedback so definitely a tutorial worth taking a look at um here it is with that scene brought into unreal so he has a section where he brings it in explains how you do it talks about some of the pros and cons because you know this is I mean unreal is putting the stuff isn't as fast as they can it's not 100 there yet but it's it's pretty exciting what's there already and there's the tutorial you can find on the website it's the Forest Trail creation um just look up Adrian Lambert and you'll find that there um this is another scene set up in Houdini so it's in Solaris turning it into USD with the layout and so on and then the same thing in unreal and Here's the final and this is actually from Peter's talk Peter our car is going to talk give this talk specifically uh I think in two hours in one of the talks this afternoon so if you want to get into the more specific details about Solaris he's going to take you through that um at a much healthier speed than I was showing you that other one so what are some of the other reasons why learning Houdini is going to be good for you as a game artist one is I think you helped you discover a richer career path Houdini artists have skills that are sort of unique in the industry they have ability to think procedurally to think ahead to plan systems that solve problems they have the ability to take challenging production issues and Tackle them head on they understand low-level Concepts and comply them to real world problems and they learn they know how to automate things make things work faster and more efficiently these are skills the industry wants and needs and as a matter of fact Pixar uses Houdini a lot right now in the work they do but before they started using Houdini they actually had Houdini's skills as one of the things on their list um that they were looking for because they knew that somebody who knew Houdini thought the way they expected an artist or a production artist to think now they just hire them and use them with Houdini but before that they were solving other problems um you also have a lot of interest interesting opportunities obviously in real time you've got Dame Dev virtual reality we've got a lot of virtual reality customers in Houdini visualization we have people using Houdini to create environments for autonomous car training and machine learning virtual production when we're in New York we were talking a little more about virtual production with the big wall and real-time projection of unreal on the wall and Houdini is great for feeding that wall with stuff and then of course you could get involved with VFX Houdini for artists and Technic directors so this huge range of of careers that are possible with a set of Houdini skills and so it's definitely worth your while taking this path uh and of course the other thing that's really nice is I I've noticed that a lot of Houdini artists can easily switch back and forth between them I know people say well I've spent too much time doing visual effects I'm gonna go play make games for a little while or people in games saying well I want to go work on movies for a little while Houdini I think the skills are a little easier to transfer and are definitely work worth working having in Your Arsenal now some people say this is debatable but Houdini is a lot easier to learn than people say it is and I think one of the problems that people encounter a little bit with that is they go to the internet search up Houdini and the first thing they get is a Vex tutorial and they see people scripting and writing big long scripts and solving big problems that's not the only way to use Houdini and it's probably not the best way to start learning Houdini um so uh what we've done on side effects is we have on the website a tutorial section under the learn menu with a whole wealth of tutorials almost too many to sort through so that's why we also have learning paths where there are specific tutorials under certain topics like there's one focus on unreal and one of the ones there for instance is the unreal starter pack so you know we were talking earlier about can people just get started so the starter pack is here's 10 assets that just work so you can just put them in unreal and work with them and never touch Houdini once you get that concept and idea then you go back and learn how to make a digital asset learn how to uh make things work one of the assets that sort of fun in the starter pack is where you actually can draw an image with Photoshop and every place you put different colors sorry did I knock this out [Music] okay or I'll Stand closer um is uh where you paint with photoshop with different colors that affects what happens on the level so you're basically level designing by painting in Photoshop and then it shows up in the game so those kinds of are kinds of examples or the other one where we we have a tutorial where you make a dungeon using what's called waveform collapse so they're like little patterns so you set up these patterns and then assets get assigned accordingly to build up this dungeon with lava and everything so there are some artist friendly tutorials available in here the getting started we have a foundation set of tutorials that are worth looking at we also have something called my learning so if you go to the my learning tab what you can do is you can go through and as you find tutorials you like you can bookmark them and then they show up in here and you can essentially build your own learning path and you can have it track your progress so many of our tutorials will track your progress through the videos when you finish it'll move it from in progress to completed so you can have a little bit of something to work against to help make your decisions we also talked about the Content Library so this is the starter kit is in here the fire example is in here and there's a whole bunch of files you can just download open up and explore and you know you probably need to do a few tutorials to get started before you do that but once you're starting to feel comfortable and do you need you can learn just from what other people have done so when we finish have a new release we'll put videos out and we just make them available for people to download and explore and then on that note we also have some time to time we do Tech demos which are much bigger projects that Encompass a lot more than just one tool or one file in this case project Titan is a whole Suite of tools we have videos talking to the artists about their experience and what it was like to work on it as well as about 12 tutorials that cover a whole bunch of different tools so if you want to learn how to Tool build this is a place to go you'll get dive in head first so there we go so I hope I've been able to introduce you to some compelling reasons to consider adding Houdini into your set of tools that you use to make games to make game art uh it is a huge growing industry that that uses Houdini day in and day out and I think uh it would definitely open some possibilities for you so thank you very much [Applause] thank you rob that was awesome uh does anyone have any questions around games game art Houdini engine digital assets anything you'd like to ask Rob yes sir right here in the front oh thank you that was a great presentation um well I heard earlier um somebody said that you had a book also but that you had written or somebody Yeah in our getting started section we have some Foundation tutorials and where I'm I got one chapter left to do and then we'll be publishing it as a book but everything that's in the book we also the P the chapters are actually available online already to doubt and load and start working through and each one comes with videos as well so if you go to getting learn getting started the first six of them are right there you could get started today awesome um also I was going to ask with The Apprentice version of Houdini can you also like I guess export the tools that you build um no um the problem was if we allowed Apprentice to go to Unreal then there'd be no reason to get Houdini um because it would just work so what we have is we have Houdini Indie allows you to do that as well as the student version so if you're a student you can get a student Edition and that will also allow you to go um take them because each version of Houdini creates a different kind of file format so um Apprentice makes what's called hip NC uh and the student version makes have Ben C or hdanc and so they can only open in certain places uh but if you if you actually use the free Apprentice version you can actually open it in your student version or at your school lab so there is an ecosystem between free apprentice and the school lab if you want to so you could make stuff in Houdini at home in apprentice and then go to your school lab and run it in unreal there but if you want to do the two you should get at least get a student license yeah awesome well thank you thank you nothing I would I would just quickly add to that that you you can get The Apprentice version to start learning just in general what like hdas are how to build networks how to build tools and then if you're a student it's 75 bucks that's it so it's less than Netflix you can get Houdini that exports and works all over the place so yeah 75 a year yeah 75 bucks a year like I said we tried to make it less than Netflix that was the goal um at our University we usually use MacBooks and I've noticed like a lot of the transfer between um Houdini and when you're using Unreal on a MacBook there's a lot of issues so my question is like what would what's the future of using Macs uh well Mac is going through their technology change right now to the new Chips and we have announced a version a compatible version is in the works to sort of get in line with that a little bit more so it's in beta right now you can actually download I don't know are you do you have an M1 chip or M2 Chip or okay okay well I think because those are happening we're sort of like moving on from the ones that we have and focusing on trying to get that to be better so after that transition it will be better any upcoming students to run Houdini you're probably better off with a PC especially if you're planning to Unreal as well unreal and Houdini together obviously a BC is going to be a little more robust yeah I mean I personally use a Mac for my Photoshop illustrator you know graphic design all that kind of stuff and then I have a box that runs from Houdini and and and um no yeah yeah I think part I've always wondered about that too and I think some of that might be if you think about gaming you're thinking either console gaming or PC gaming like a lot of people don't think oh I want to buy a Mac so I can be a hardcore gamer right so you're developing for that platform it's like being on that platform and I I mean I'm I I get it I totally get it because the majority of the schools that we work with have Big Mac labs and Big Mac investment so it's yeah a lot of these artists they start out sure [Music] well like I said we are committing to moving over to the new checks that's not going to help you if you have an older lab and so probably whatever effort we have right now is not fixing what's not working in the old one it's probably fixing what's going to happen in the future future systems but uh you know I mean have you been submitting them into tech support and so on some problems yeah and a lot of the other software that we connect with you know everybody does their Mac version at different times at different stages so that there's there's probably less compatibility there between all the moving Parts on the Mac than there might be on another system but but anyway that's a good point to bring home that uh you know because I think sometimes our development team they work on Linux primarily Windows is a stretch for them and only a few people are brave enough to work on the Mac because they they love their their Linux shows so you know I think we need to emphasize to them that that the Mac plays a role right from the bottom up in terms of artists learning process so that's great are there uh other any other questions that we have for Rob this is your opportunity to talk to one of the uh Legends of computer Graphics instruction right here yeah we've got one more right here I would I would also say if anybody wants to donate a can of WD-40 to this just something about wave um using Wave just to actually do dungeons it's kind of like a dungeon generation could you kind of elaborate more on that yeah so there was something something called wave function collapse and it's it's where you draw these little patterns and then you can use those patterns to drive a system so it's it's a very procedural solution to I want to make a dungeon but I don't want to do it by hand and so it creates um pieces for the corner inside pieces outside pieces flat pieces you know encompassing pieces so there's all these pieces so once they all get set up then you build these little Maps so um I don't have the internet on here but um I can show you maybe afterwards on my phone but the um there's there's definitely a starter kit tool for doing that that's not a dungeon that's just for wave function collapse but there is an actual dedicated on in the unreal you uh learning path there's a tutorial focused on that so if you go to the learn menu learning paths and scroll down under gaming there's unreal click on that you'll find it amongst those and um that one's probably one of the more sophisticated ones as the tutorial goes but again it's designed once you've set it up it just works so it could be a matter of if you know my understanding is you're working with younger kids that you might want to just give them the finished tool because I think it comes with the Finish tool say well here's a tool play with these parameters and boom you've got a dungeon okay now go you move at this and get a dungeon or that's again the starter kit assets are great for that you go and I'm going to draw a wall just draw the wall they don't have to think about polygons or Texture Maps or anything like that they can just use it accordingly so but you know it's one of the neat things about Houdini engine is that it opens up this possibility for so many people to learn Houdini without touching Houdini at all get inspired by it and then their desire to maybe go on and become tool Builders will grow from that and and it also might take away some of the fear of touching computer Graphics in general so you could build a little tool set for them and they can get further faster because of digital assets and then that inspires them to want to dig down and learn what's going on under the hood yeah quickest time to First success right yeah it sounds weird but it is kind of like gambling a bit right you do something and you get a win and you get that like dopamine head you go hey that's cool I want to do more of that right question in the back thank you for a great presentation did I hear you correctly you got Houdini on your phone now no the tutorials on the phone tutorials on the phone you can use it to watch the tutorial you'll have to do the other part on yeah yeah it it won't it won't run on an iMac but on a new iPhone yeah we've got some real wishful thinking in that one yeah yeah all right uh so we're gonna take oh is there another question any other questions let me ask oh right here let's go let's go one back oh thank you thank you I feel a little bad for astons considering 19.5 this is that odf but in terms of game development what do you think is next for Houdini well one of the big things we're going to be doing within the next year is really enhancing the character side of Houdini we have a new technology called kinfx which is in Houdini today and there's actually a presentation on it tomorrow and the presentation tomorrow is actually about taking a meta-human from unreal bringing it into Houdini adding anime motion capture animation to it and then plugging that back into unreal so we've already got the core architecture of that working today but the next big thing for us is to open that up to riggers and animators to really go town to town and it's a procedural animation system which opens some interesting possibilities that well we'll have you have to wait till we bring it out and then you'll you'll see it's pretty cool stuff so you know one of the things we we believe is there's no point in us bringing you out the same tools you already have in other places so if we're going to tackle something like character we're going to do in a new and exciting way uh and allow you to be more productive and and and accomplish more so you'll be hopefully be seeing a lot more Houdini characters in the next couple years as as kenfx takes off yeah we have other questions one more one more in the front we'll make this last one then we'll take a little break um this is just a small question that I have just because um in my job we work with unreal five and some plugins are not available for unreal 5 so is like the Houdini plug-in the Houdini engine available from Real Fine engine is there's just one thing that we still have to massage which is the way it works with World composition or that's what it yeah that's the one right yeah yeah so World composition there's a few little issues with that that we need to iron out we're working on that right now but if you want to just bring Assets in and use them um yeah it works and and the tutorial I have on the website which is uh how to build assets for unreal I use unreal5 and so you can run through that lesson and you're all good to go awesome thank you all right thank you rob everybody give Rob one more round of applause yeah

Channel: Houdini

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Id: eNUihpKIM44

Length: 69min 21sec (4161 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022