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'Daydreamer' Production Pipeline Volume 6: Dynamics

by John Moncrief

In this Houdini tutorial, we'll take a look at the visual effects portion of the pipeline for a short we produced for SIGGRAPH. Software required: Maya 2016 and Houdini 14.

What you'll learn

In this Houdini tutorial, we'll take a look at the visual effects portion of the pipeline for a short we produced for SIGGRAPH. Throughout the tutorial, we'll look at how to identify what's needed from the FX department by breaking down the animatic. We'll learn how to build an effective visual effects pipeline that fits the project's needs, and how to get elements in and out of various software packages. We'll discuss using optimized workflows for Houdini DOPs production, geometry caching workflows, and how to create rendered elements for use in NUKE. This tutorial doesn't go step-by-step through all of the assets we used, but it's intended to provide you with an insight to the overall concepts, production methodology and workflow. Before beginning this tutorial, we recommend you have a familiarity with the general concepts of Houdini's dynamics context, surface operators, and rendering workflow. By the end of this Houdini training, you'll have an understanding of how all of the FX were created for the Daydreamer production pipeline series. Software required: Maya 2016 and Houdini 14.

About the author

John is the resident Houdini and dynamics author at Pluralsight. In college, he had the opportunity to work at SideFX (the creators of Houdini) and has been able to teach dynamics and visual effects to numerous creative industry professionals over the years. He lives for the rush of seeing his pupils experience "light bulb" moments. John's latest passion has been breathing new life into the Pluralsight Houdini training library and making sure that no software or tools can get in the way of an ar... more

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