Wednesday, July 29, 2009

See you in New Orleans!

We'll be at SIGGRAPH 2009 soon and promoting Houdini Education at our booth.

Even though we won't be doing any public presentations ourselves, do check out some stuff from our clients!


Thursday, July 16, 2009

Houdini at 50% off!

We don't do them that often, so take a look at the promotion we have going for Master licenses right now!

GO|Procedural and save 50% on a Master Bundle where you get one year AUP included!

Friday, July 10, 2009

wall flowers

Once again, we've been surprised by a new way of using Houdini. This game never gets old, really.

Handmade Wallpaper done by Alex Stephan based in Toronto. Here's a little blurb about how it's all done, but you can't get too technical with everyone :).

Houdini Education at SIGGRAPH 2009


Join us this SIGGRAPH in New Orleans at our Houdini Education Booth!


We'll also be sponsoring the Thursday reception, so we hope to see you all there!

You can contact us for personal demonstrations or meetings through community@sidefx.com.

See you all there :)

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Transformers and Houdini Mentions from DD


Matthew Butler, a long time Houdini user and VFX Supervisor at Digital Domain has been mentioned in today's LA Times!

No green screen or motion capture was used when shooting actress Isabel Lucas. But it took seven months for a team of 20 to create countless layers of effects, devised with complex equations and meticulous rendering with the software Houdini to create the six-second shot.
An even more in-depth look here on the LA Times Blog!


Nice work Matthew!

More nerdery can be found in Millimeter here from Paul Palop.

“I think we did 30,000 CG ball bearings,” Palop say. “We had to develop a crowd system in [Side Effects Software] Houdini to be able to control their behaviors. Houdini can assign a charge to a particle and you can set up rules that define how that charge changes over time depending on what’s happening around it. We could define, based on the reference from Michael’s photography, what these guys needed to do to make it to seem like they had some level of intellect. The approach we took was to simulate particles, give them a behavior, and stamp prebaked animation cycles from our library onto those particles. Our system chooses—depending on the action required—which animation cycles we would stamp on the particles.”



Special thanks to Tim Enstice over at DD for giving us props :)