SideFX Houdini 2022 Games Reel

[Sharinghack]

Here is the Houdini Games Reel 2022.

Houdini is one the most prolific and powerful tools nowadays for game development. I use almost it everyday for work although in a VFX/Motion Design context and I would like you guys to know this tool a bit better.

As a tool it is responsible for the amazing scalability and detail we have in games nowadays, especially in more open/expansive worlds.

If you guys are curious about it, I can use this thread to post some workflow examples and more details on how these tools can improve and speed up not only VFX work for film/ads, but also game development.

 

[Sharinghack]

Hello again guys.

Here is a video about how Insomniac used Houdini to build the worlds of Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart and Spiderman: Miles Morales. Incredible stuff.

It's only 20mn long. but very interesting.

 

[Darth Vader]

Thank you for sharing this @Sharinghack

 

[Deleted member 13]

Here is the Houdini Games Reel 2022.

Houdini is one the most prolific and powerful tools nowadays for game development. I use almost it everyday for work although in a VFX/Motion Design context and I would like you guys to know this tool a bit better.

As a tool it is responsible for the amazing scalability and detail we have in games nowadays, especially in more open/expansive worlds.

If you guys are curious about it, I can use this thread to post some workflow examples and more details on how these tools can improve and speed up not only VFX work for film/ads, but also game development.

Man, I was responsible for presenting a comparison Houdini's Mantra vs. Maya's Arnold to upper management to decide which direction the studio should go. It wasn't pretty. Supervision decided on Maya's Arnold back then because it was so much faster and many artists in the studio couldn't get the hang of the complexity of a procedurally driven application like Houdini. We kept Houdini for just FX. Nowadays however, Houdini has Arnold renderer now though.

 

[Sharinghack]

Man, I was responsible for presenting a comparison Houdini's Mantra vs. Maya's Arnold to upper management to decide which direction the studio should go. It wasn't pretty. Supervision decided on Maya's Arnold back then because it was so much faster and many artists in the studio couldn't get the hang of the complexity of a procedurally driven application like Houdini. We kept Houdini for just FX. Nowadays however, Houdini has Arnold renderer now though.

Well to be fair in terms of renderer, Mantra should never have been a choice IMO, test it for 30 minutes and you notice right away that it is a very slow renderer, but very powerful and customizable. Mantra can be quite fast in very particular situations, volume rendering and fur rendering for instance.
All in all, Arnold is no doubt a better choice.

But comparing DCC packages, nowadays Houdini is a much more complete package than Maya, except animation tools there is not a single field in Maya that outperforms Houdini. And I'm a guy that came from many years of Maya and transitioned to Houdini.

 

[Deleted member 13]

Well to be fair in terms of renderer, Mantra should never have been a choice IMO, test it for 30 minutes and you notice right away that it is a very slow renderer, but very powerful and customizable. Mantra can be quite fast in very particular situations, volume rendering and fur rendering for instance.
All in all, Arnold is no doubt a better choice.

But comparing DCC packages, nowadays Houdini is a much more complete package than Maya, except animation tools there is not a single field in Maya that outperforms Houdini. And I'm a guy that came from many years of Maya and transitioned to Houdini.

Agree. It's just that Maya grabbed onto the VFX industry pretty quickly and most talent knows Maya more and it's more intuitive. Houdini is definitely more powerful for sure. Our artists just couldn't hang with it's complexity.

 

[yewles1]

Reminds me of Uncharted 3...

Naughty Dog - Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception | SideFX

Taking the procedural approach, Naughty Dog delivers a whole new level of FX realism in the latest edition of the Uncharted series. With Houdini, they found a solution that would give them flexibility and control, while making it easy to export to their proprietary gaming engine. By using a...

www.sidefx.com

 

[Deleted member 13]

Reminds me of Uncharted 3...

Naughty Dog - Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception | SideFX

Taking the procedural approach, Naughty Dog delivers a whole new level of FX realism in the latest edition of the Uncharted series. With Houdini, they found a solution that would give them flexibility and control, while making it easy to export to their proprietary gaming engine. By using a...

www.sidefx.com

Very interesting. A lot more studios going with Houdini is a surprise for me because it was such a hassle for our artists. I'm starting to think our artists were just not very flexible with understanding scripting and getting what they want. Hypershade in Maya is definitely more intuitive. Thoughts @Sharinghack ?

 

[Sharinghack]

Very interesting. A lot more studios going with Houdini is a surprise for me because it was such a hassle for our artists. I'm starting to think our artists were just not very flexible with understanding scripting and getting what they want. Hypershade in Maya is definitely more intuitive. Thoughts @Sharinghack ?

What kind of work was required for your artist to deliver in Houdini?

If I remember correctly Hypershade in Maya is just the shader building context? Does it have any aditional functions nowadays? (Last time I used Maya was around 2012, when I switched to Houdini).

Hypergraph in Maya was a mess, very dificult to read and the UI was slow. The only thing that could be compared with Houdini was Softimage ICE (RIP).

Also VEX language is Houdini is a lot more artist friendly than MEL scripting.

Houdini's power comes from its non-destructive procedural workflows and rapid iterations, a single artist can generate thousands of assets and variations over night with the help of the PDG context for example. Also, related to shader building, any vertex masks or atributes tou cr4eate in a geometry level can be pulled in to a shader context to help shader building.

 

[Sharinghack]

You can check a bit of the power of PDG (Procedural Dependency Graph) with this presentation by Rob Stauffer at GDC 2019.

 

[Deleted member 13]

What kind of work was required for your artist to deliver in Houdini?

Feature film work. All of them hated Houdini except the FX artists.

If I remember correctly Hypershade in Maya is just the shader building context? Does it have any aditional functions nowadays? (Last time I used Maya was around 2012, when I switched to Houdini).

Yea, the Hypershade was where I introduced all of my shader code developed from the various renderers. Whether it was Mental Ray, Renderman or Arnold, I was always making shaders that would be squeezed into Hypershade. Many people were familiar with the default shaders in Maya as well as being able to come up with a shader rather quickly. I will say my experience with Houdini on shader networks while more robust, was definitely not as intuitive.

Hypergraph in Maya was a mess, very dificult to read and the UI was slow. The only thing that could be compared with Houdini was Softimage ICE (RIP).

Difficult to read? Slow update? Nah, that wasn't a problem for us. Unless you are talking about shader networks that included 100s of nodes - then yea.

Also VEX language is Houdini is a lot more artist friendly than MEL scripting.

Agree here. But our artists never wrote scripts. Our programmers did the scripting.

Houdini's power comes from its non-destructive procedural workflows and rapid iterations, a single artist can generate thousands of assets and variations over night with the help of the PDG context for example.

Agree.

 

[brainchild]

Good to see some Houdini love on this forum!

My current project wouldn't be possible as an indie dev without powerful procedural tools like Houdini (my city was generated by this tool). I'm currently using Nanite assets for high fidelity geometry and scaling up the scope with Houdini. There is a steep learning curve for anyone new to Houdini but it's totally worth the investment given its potential.

 

[Sharinghack]

Good to see some Houdini love on this forum!

My current project wouldn't be possible as an indie dev without powerful procedural tools like Houdini (my city was generated by this tool). I'm currently using Nanite assets for high fidelity geometry and scaling up the scope with Houdini. There is a steep learning curve for anyone new to Houdini but it's totally worth the investment given its potential.

Awsome seeing more and more Indie studios using Houdini, that's a really smart move. Yes the learning curve is steep, but then the output more than compensates for that.

And it is very important for those Digital Assets to keep being updated, more and more detail can be added, and you guys can deal with all the LODs in one go, all procedural.

Can't wait to see the result of your work!

 

[Sharinghack]

Feature film work. All of them hated Houdini except the FX artists.

Sure feature film, but what kind of work specifically? Particle sims, Fluid sims? Destruction? Modelling?

 

[Deleted member 13]

Sure feature film, but what kind of work specifically? Particle sims, Fluid sims? Destruction? Modelling?

The entire pipeline was centered around Houdini when we made Book of Life. So the lighters, texture artists, etc.. (entire back end) was required to use Houdini and Mantra. The front end was still using Maya. They exported animation, etc.. to Houdini. The lighters could never get used to it and the texture guys (along with Look Dev) could never understand their shader networks properly since everything was so granular. My proposal was to get away from Houdini for our backend and go back to Maya with Arnold.