a blast from the past

Thanks Greg!

December roundup

Hello Houdini folks! We've had a very busy winter season. Early this month we held an LA Networking event with recruiters from Motion Theory and R&H. We had over 100 attendees, old and new users alike, gathering to meet and greet and enjoy an evening of Houdini talk and catching up.

And on another note, we've recently done loads of new customer stories. Definitely check out the new one on the Katy Perry video done at Radium Reel FX. 

Lastly, we're super excited about providing an all new user guide to Houdini. Lots of good stuff in there, and definitely worth a read even if you're an experienced user.

Best of luck and happy wishes to you till the new year!

Vancouver trip - November 2010

Hey Vancouver, thanks for the snow. It was great to see all our users and meet with various clients in the area. We were there for the VES Vancouver CAVE event at District 319.


As usual, VHUG had a great meeting, and we learned a bunch of new applications for using Houdini’s proceduralism.

Here’s a few photos of the Vancouver users who meet every few months. Definitely check up on their Facebook page to learn more!

Some users: Leo Chan (head of VHUG), Peter Bowmar, Caleb Howard, Georg Duemlein, Greg Massie, Ivan DeWolf, Carlos Lemus

Hey - here’s John Courte (Senior Houdini Artist) and Richard Hamel (VP Sales/Mktg) in front of the famous Steamclock in Gaslamp District!

October Roundup

Hey thanks to everyone who came out to the SF Usergroup at PIXAR last week. It was a great success and we had almost 100 attendees come see the presentations from Image Movers Digital and PIXAR :).

Here are a few photos:

Xray from Image Movers Digital presents his Houdini and Massive workflow

Bay Area users watch - and some came in from Vancouver and Utah!

Last week, Side Effects also sponsored the 2nd VES Production Summit in Marina Del Rey.  Here's a link to a Variety article re-capping some of its highlights.

Houdini Usergroup in Northern California

Hey everyone,

We'll be hosting a Houdini usergroup meeting with great presentations on October 20, 2010 at the PIXAR campus.

Please come here to RSVP!

od[challenge] 2010 is Live!

Our friends over at OdForce have launched a new od[challenge].

Check out the details here!

Post SIGGRAPH 2010 Roundup

We had an amazing time this year at SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles. Our Education Team had a booth on the show floor and met with loads of people eager to learn or teach Houdini at their schools.

We even held an education mixer at our Santa Monica Training space and had many attendees roll through to meet with various staff from Side Effects both LA and Toronto facilities.

All this was capped off by an amazing event to to launch our latest and greatest version of Houdini.

Lots of thanks again to our lovely presenters:

• Marion Spates and Christopher Leone from Motion Theory presenting on World of Color (Disney commercial)
• Jeremy Hampton from Digital Domain presenting on Percy Jackson
• Spencer Lueders from Framestore NY presenting on Salt.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the Houdini 11 Launch event as well, we loved getting to hang with our talented users and fans. And the performance from Fire Groove made it all a wonderful celebration :).

Spencer Lueders presenting on SALT

mingling around and meeting other Houdini nerds

H11 and SIGGRAPH 2010!

It's been a while, I know. I owe a major blog update.

But for now, let's get excited about the news around Houdini 11! Check out the sneak peak from Kim on our site as well as a list of all the new stuff in there.

We'll be going Gold with Houdini 11 just before SIGGRAPH this year in Los Angeles... which means we'll have to celebration as well :)



Come join us for a great event at the Cooper Design Building in downtown Los Angeles on July 27th (just blocks away from the conference center).

Here's more information on the Launch Event as well as details for our Education Booth and presence at SIGGRAPH this year.

Don't forget to RSVP!!

PS: If you're currently a commercial customer current on AUP, you'll be getting access to Houdini 11 Beta in just a few short days.

Leo Chan and Ziggy at GDX and SCAD

SCAD Atlanta and SCAD and the GDX in Savannah all got a great dose of Houdini from EA's Leo Chan and SESI's Ziggy Ostertag, with Aliza covering both bases. Here's a synopsis:



Ziggy and Clark at SCAD Atlanta studio






SCAD grad students listening to
Ziggy's Intro to Houdini













Leo and Debra Fowler of SCAD field
questions at GDX












Leo introduces a whole new generation
to Brian Eno's
"Music for Airports",
via Houdini.

Colliding implied surfaces is cool!

Learn how with this Thursday's class "Understanding Volume Primitives". Dave Koester will break it down for all DOPs fans.

Call us for class files at 310.319.9876.

Beginners to Experts

Last week's training covered everything from "how to make a movie with special effects" (for Loyola Marymount students) and a "very gentle intro to Python in Houdini" with Igor Boshoer, to "Motion FX & CHOPs" with Gonzo Cababaca and "Python Tricks" with Houdini guru Luke Moore.

Is that snake charming?

Side Effects Welcomes Siegfried Ostertag

Ziggy Ostertag has joined the Side Effects team as Houdini Trainer, and is shown here on his first day at work, right in the thick of it.

Ziggy began his VFX career in Germany at Computer Projects Unlimited, and at C.O.R.E. & Effectory as both trainer and VFX TD. He has worked at Rhythm & Hues, Imageworks, and Digital Domain in LA.

Come learn from the master!

Houdini Training at Graffiti School, Mumbai

Andrew Lowell at Mumbai workshop with VFX trainers from Big Animation, Frameboxx, Foskia Graffiti and others.

Look for great Houdini effects coming out of Bollywood soon!

thanks VHUG!

John Courte and I just got back from beautiful Vancouver. What a way to catch up, the post Olympics sentiments and Canadian pride were still going strong.

While there, we had the pleasure of joining up with the VHUG (Vancouver Houdini User Group) for their first community presentation, kicked off and led by Leo Chan of Electronic Arts Canada.

From VHUG Kickoff Presentation for 2010

Left to right (Leo Chan, unknown, Craig Zerounie, John Courte, Sean Lewkiw, Robert Kelly, Leyla Tirgari, Greg Massie, Paul Flanagan, Kashayar Khalkhaly)

VHUG Kickoff Presentation for 2010

John Courte (Senior Houdini Artist) and myself will be in Vancouver on March 3rd for the first presentation from the Vancouver Houdini User Group (VHUG).

Come join us at CIS Vancouver starting at 7pm to hear from Leo Chan from EA!

View Larger Map



We'll be buying the first round of drinks over a few blocks at the Whip Restaurant and Bar afterward to chat, meet, and mingle with the local userbase.

Don't forget to RSVP for the event on the official Facebook page!

Houdini Essentials with Andrew Lowell

Andrew Lowell, straight from Massive/Houdini TD on Invictus, is at Side Effects, Santa Monica to teach Houdini Essentials Over 2 Days this Thu Mar 4 & Fri Mar 5, 10 - 5pm.

Vancouver's Ray Corbett Teaching at Sidefx

Houdini and Nuke Artist
Raymond Corbett
will be in LA this week to teach 2 workshops at Side Effects:

Houdini and Nuke Workflow on Friday the 26th from 2 to 4:30
and
Working with Trail Effects on Saturday the 27th from 9 to 5

Dr D Recruiting in London!!

From Blogger Pictures

Face tracking with OpenCV, Python, and Houdini

OK, I know I promised you something else in my last post regarding how to animate the real-world data given up by DOPs on the Interceptor, but I got a little sidetracked instead. Today's exercise is how to make strange data talk dirty to Houdini.

I give you the humble PipeIN CHOP. The PipeIn CHOP has been around since before some of you could legally buy a beer, and its primary purpose is to take in data from external apps and sources. Oh great! Awesome! Now I can connect my Lego Mindstorms to Houdini and terrorize the cat! Not so fast, hoss. It's a little like the secret knock to the after-hours rave. Unless you send it exactly the bytes it needs, in exactly the right order, in exactly the right format, you ain't gettin' in. Houdini's PipeIn CHOP likes to get its data in very specific ways. You can't just blow bits at it and expect it to assemble you a pony at the molecular-genetic level.

The PipeIn CHOP gets its data from a named pipe, which is a temp file specifically created and written to for that purpose.

The docs are a bit terse, but what you need to know is this: You poke the PipeIn Chop with commands, the four most useful being 'reset,' 'send current sample,' 'send channel names,' and 'upload.' This is not very far from the ancient Commodore 64 cassette drive. Maybe some of your parents have one in the attic, put there when they had to make room for you.

The point is, once you can make that work for you, the rest is pretty much cake. Watch the video. Afterwards, I'll post some of the code that makes it happen.



Here's the python code for the reset command:

## reset command
def send_reset(fifo):
p = pack('cccc', chr(170), chr(0), chr(170), chr(0))
fifo.write(p)
fifo.flush()

The reset character is 170. We like it so much, we send it twice.

Here's the python code for the 'send current sample'

def send_single_sample(fifo, numchans, val):
cmd_type = 1
num_channels = numchans
vals = val
p = pack('>ii', cmd_type, num_channels )
fifo.write(p)
for i in range(numchans):
v = pack('>f', vals[i])
fifo.write(v)



The '>' character signifies the endian-ness of the data. If any of you have the misfortune to be running Houdini on IRIX, change this to '<.' Tongue firmly in cheek, of course. The 'ii' is part of the 'struct' module in python that formats the data as in, two integers, followed by as many floats as there are channels.

Obviously, this is part of a much bigger script, which I'll post as soon as I can figure out where to put it and link to it.

Free Lunch!

Yesterday's free, one hour Intro to Houdini class provided a great way to get Going Procedural, with beautiful work files from Goncalo Cabaca and great snacks as well! Keep an eye on Side Effects Training for more classes to come.

Look At That!

Hi all.

My name is John Courte and I'm the senior Houdini Artist at Side Effects Software Los Angeles. I've been using Houdini and a lot of other stuff for a very long time, and now I have the opportunity to share that experience with you, the user community. Whether you're a seasoned Houdini vet (with scars), or a complete noob to CGI, I hope I can share with you some things that will make your days easier and get you home before you get that 'last person to leave the building' feeling.

First one is one I bumped into today, and that's camera lookats and dynamic objects. This is geared more towards a newer user, but i'll pose it as an option for the multi-year guru as well.

Handing off from Objects to DOPs happens in a number of ways, usually by animating something, then telling DOPs to make that something 'active' at a predetermined frame. Let's say you animated a car, and at frame 120, it gets hit by a train, flinging it across the Walmart parking lot and into the row of coin-op bouncy rides. You want to see this action from your camera, because a car going airborne and flying into a Walmart is awesome.

Easy. You just drag the path of the handoff (/obj/car) object from the tree-view into the lookat field of the camera. And then guess what? It doesn't work! The camera looks at the object until the handoff frame, then stops.

OK, well, you're smarter than the average bear, so you go "Aha!" Then you drag the RBD object in question from under /obj/AutoDopNetwork to the lookat field. This time, the camera doesn't even follow the car before the handoff.

This is where the gotcha happens. Instead of /obj/AutoDopNetwork/car, you need to make it /obj/AutoDopNetwork:car. That ONE little ascii character is the difference between simplicity incarnate and a long, drawn-out tea ceremony involving CHOPs, expressions, and a long night of rapidly graying hairs.

If you'd rather your camera just look at a real object, use a Fetch object and reference the dopobject, using the same syntax as the previous example in the lookat.

What if that's not an option, for some reason? Then you pull out the hammer. Create a rivet object and pick a point on /obj/car/dopimport1 or whatever you've called your dopimport SOP. Set the camera to look at the rivet object and you're done.

Full House for Python In Houdini

Lots of interest in this topic led to a full house for our first class of 2010. Oliver Palmer will be teaching Python in Houdini II tonight to another sell out crowd. For more 2010 workshops (including John Courte's RBD Survival Guide) check out the Side Effects Training page.

Goodbye 2009

Happy New Year! We've had a great wrap up for the last of 2009, Loads of great events, super training through our Santa Monica office, and wonderful customer stories we loved to share with our readers.

Rounding out the year, a few of us went to SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in Yokohama, Japan. There, Senior Houdini Artist John Courte gave several Houdini technical talks about the workflow in Houdini.


To start off the new year, please check out our latest customer story about the new Clint Eastwood movie, Invictus!