"You need a PHD to Learn Houdini 3D"

is houdini 3d hard to learn for anyone familiar with side effects is houdini this can actually be a really really loaded question there's no doubt that it's one of the most robust software out there for 3d content creation but to better understand this question we have to dig deeper into what is houdini and what are you using it for also if you want to learn how to create beautiful environments in unreal engine check out my brand new environment art course called the environment artist survival kit where you're going to learn everything from making flowing grass to fluffy trees and sweeping beautiful landscapes i'll leave a link in the description for anyone who's interested in checking out the course houdini is an entirely node-based software that harnesses the power of proceduralism to build networks of nodes that create an output nodes are compiled pieces of code that can be linked in a chain with other nodes to create attributes parameters or functions each one has specific traits and features people who are familiar with other node-based software such as unreal engine blueprints and substance designer will find houdini's node-based interface much easier than others now proceduralism means aspects of the digital content created can be changed non-destructively at any point in the pipeline or lifespan there are some other software out there that harness the power of proceduralism ranging from fully procedural like substance designer or semi procedural features like 3ds max and blender's modifier stack the big difference here being that fully procedural means any part of the development cycle can be changed independently of its other components and will update the end result in real time while semi-procedural has some non-destructive features at some point in the development cycle it can't be changed without redoing things in essence it's linked in its history to other components that can't make up its content so here's where things get a little complicated and where people get intimidated by houdini it's important to understand that houdini doesn't operate like your traditional modelling package everything is created through nodes and we need to break down the framework in which you create these node-based networks in houdini there are different types of node network folders called contexts and each serve a different purpose you can think of context as different apps within houdini based on whichever context folder you're using the tools available will change now there are several of these contexts but the main ones you might use are sops aka surface operators which handle modeling and geometry manipulation dops and pops for dynamics and particle operations rop for rendering chop for animation and motion fx and mat net which handles shader development and materials now this type of separation while it seems confusing at the start it actually really helps keep everything organized now you may be asking yourself doesn't houdini involve a lot of coding the answer is yeah if you want to unleash the full power of houdini and accomplish more complex tasks you'll need to know how to code in vex houdini's native coding language but for a majority of tasks you don't need to know how to code at all to start using it and for many simpler tasks you won't ever need to touch any code the way you can work around using vex is by using another context called vops the visual representation of vex you can think of vops like you would in unreal engine where the artist can use blueprints instead of c plus or the hypershade editor in maya for cinematics in film visual effects like ilm and way to digital use houdini to create procedural environments and effects from the new star wars trilogy to the marvel cinematic universe a lot of these artists use houdini in production virtually any movie today with vfx uses houdini in some capacity conversely in the games industry houdini has become a highly regarded tool for technical artists in fact some studios hire people just for their expertise in houdini one such game that has leveraged the power of proceduralism is ubisoft's far cry 5. during the game's development the technical art team realized that in order to create the massive landscape of montana they would need to procedurally generate it so that they wouldn't have to sculpt the terrain by hand every time they wanted to iterate on it however another issue they quickly realized was that whenever they had the landscape change the trees that dotted the surface didn't update with it making it look kind of unrealistic the technical artist then built a node network that would solve this problem another developer that comes to mind as a houdini powerhouse is the double a studio gunfire games you may have played their game remnant from the ashes and you may have realized that every time you play a level or die whenever you respond the level is different this isn't a new handcrafted world you're experiencing every single time obviously it's a procedurally generated world based on the algorithm created by houdini by leveraging this tech you can have endless versions with slight variations in playable space and player encounters with enemies if that wasn't badass enough another game utilizing houdini fx is naughty dogs uncharted 4 a thief's end which is kind of a no-brainer seeing how cinematic the gameplay is in this game technical artists were able to use houdini for pre-baked animations using houdini's dops and sops to create rigid body fracturing and destruction uncharted had plenty of destruction and many games rely on houdini's powerful tools for these kind of animations because of its procedural nature animating these kinds of things are so much easier to go back and iterate on when fracturing objects naughty dog's tech artists could either cut meshes into pieces by hand in maya to precisely match the texture for sequences close to the camera or for larger objects with further away textures utilizing the instantaneous fracturing tools in houdini that we've discussed earlier on in the video while some game studios might be incorporating houdini only relatively recently into their pipeline gorilla games has been no stranger to it the wildly popular kill zone franchise has been using houdini for quite some time for a wide range of realistic in-game effects ranging from ocean waves to destruction cloth simulations terrain generation and more in killzone shadowfall particle simulation was actually a big factor in bringing the immersive cinematic quality gameplay to ps4 consoles when working in a game dev pipeline with console hardware restrictions you have much less of a memory budget for particle-based vfx unlike film and cinematics which can render millions of particle counts for game artists you're limited to only several hundreds according to bench trivers a senior specialist artist at gorilla games houdini's ability to render a complete effect as an animated sprite let us retain the fine detail rendering in houdini allowed us to separate different lighting passes and their motion vectors making it easier to fluently integrate the effects in a real-time scene one of the great things about houdini is a set of tools known as side fx labs this plugin includes over 150 tools geared towards assisting houdini users with a variety of tasks commonly found in all forms of digital content creation or more specifically game creation pipelines so you don't have to make these nodes networks from scratch some examples are effects such as creating smoke and fire volumes and physics simulations uv mapping with the auto uv and the uv transfer tools and world building like we discussed earlier with tools that generate everything from trees to roads buildings to cables and vines using curves and sci-fi panels there's also some cool tools to help you with modeling and a ton of more stuff keep in mind this is just a general breakdown of what houdini has to offer towards only one aspect of use in development pipelines in games developers like ubisoft use houdini for scattering objects generating terrain and simulating destruction in film it could be look dev shader development and lighting keep in mind houdini integrates beautifully with many third-party pre-renderers like renderman v-ray and redshift just to name a few speaking of integration houdini combines seamlessly with gaia a procedural terrain generating software guy's dedicated terrain processors can augment houdini's terrain tools to give you the best of both worlds you can utilize a single gaia node such as erosion stacks texture etc or an entire graph network inside houdini this isn't just useful if you're making a sprawling world but also for creating vistas in the background of the scenes the best part of all of this is that you can quickly iterate on it this landscape by changing just a couple of parameters leaving you with an entirely different environment when you first start diving into houdini and everything that it can offer it may be pretty overwhelming especially when you're starting out there's a pretty big learning curve like with most 3d creation software and that curve can be even bigger when creating with procedural base software the thing to keep in mind when learning houdini is that once you learn how to make procedural and quality of life tools it will save you a lot of time in the long run from having to make things every time and by hand in the future technical art is a crucial part of the game dev pipeline and is a vital role in any studio or personal scene that you're working on at home even if you're not trying to become a technical artist it would be great to know how to leverage the power of tool authoring to your specific workflow and the problem and the task that you're trying to tackle at the bottom line speed and flexibility is one of the biggest advantages with houdini you may spend a few hours making one tool but that tool in turn will save you several or a hundred hours down the road so is houdini 3d hard to learn well the short answer is yeah it is it's one of the harder to learn digital 3d softwares out there it's tremendously robust and expert level users can do seemingly impossible things with it becoming a houdini master specifically requires a thorough understanding of commonly used math basics like vectors matrices cross product dot product and trigonometric functions on the plus side houdini has a tremendously helpful community and a fantastic learning material and tutorials base that makes a complicated software like itself much more approachable i'll link some resources in the description below the industry is changing and with programs like qixel and photogrammetry being a generalist will be increasingly in demand environment artists for instance are expected to know more technical aspects of 3d than ever before there are some big trends happening in game development right now and games are getting bigger and with that proceduralism has proven exactly what studios need to create these massive worlds as software is beginning to outpace the hardware consoles are having a harder and harder time fitting what artists can create on just optical disks and memory storage alone having a procedural non-destructive tool like houdini makes managing memory budgets much easier and faster now you don't need to know houdini but it doesn't hurt to know one of the most powerful software available and to leverage that into your workflow and not to mention if you like technical stuff houdini is super fun and i recommend that you give it a try thanks for watching guys as usual i'm thomas from stylize station and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 119,118

Keywords: is houdini hard to learn, houdini 3d, sidefx, side fx, learn houdini 3d, houdini vfx, houdini simulations

Id: XZ73T-fEbAw

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021