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!

• Our friends at Rhythm & Hues, Lucio Flores and David Horsely will present on using Distributed Sims on "Land of the Lost"
  

• Guerilla Games' Paulus Bannink talks about how to use Houdini in Games Pipeline (as done in Killzone 2).

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!

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 :)

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 :)

Terminator Salvation Case Study Posted

Check out the great case study on Terminator Salvation recently posted on the Houdini site!

Great thanks to Asylum Visual Effects for helping us bring public the great techniques utilized through Houdini to make a great FX film.

PS: Trivia for you kids out there. John Courte, recently hired as our LA based Senior Houdini artist just recently wrapped at Asylum before joining us back in March!

John Courte, Jeff Lait, Jenny Blacklock, Silvinna Rocca, and Martin Sawtell at the Side Effects headquarters office in Toronto.

New York Pics and event highlights

Thanks to everyone for coming out during the rain for our Houdini 10 Launch at NYU's Cantor Theater!

Spencer Lueders, FX TD, did a wonderful presentation on the Framestore NY Pepsi spot below:



Then Andy Boyd, Head of 3D at Method LA, showed us his latest commercial work and highlighted uses of Mantra's PBR.

Then Jeff showed the crowd the newest things in Houdini 10.




Later, we all enjoyed a drink at the reception down the street.

(Andy Boyd and Jeff Wagner)

(Janet Fraser and Andy Boyd)

(Spencer Lueders and David Mellor from Framestore, me from Side Effects)