Houdini CFX Workshop
Season 2!
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Ready to start this adventure?
🎥 Class format
The sessions are recorded, with practical exercises, and support via Discord.
Have one year's access to the classes and you can access them to reinforce what you've learned or review a topic at your leisure.
Hey! I'm Erin
Your colleague and mentor of Houdini and Character FX
I am a CFX artist and a Houdini enthusiast.
Kite It was born from my desire to share everything I've learned about clothing, hair, muscles, and movement in characters.
In this second season we go deeper: the complex, the challenging, what really makes you grow as an artist.
If you're as passionate about CFX as I am, here's a space to learn, create, and fly.
📽️ Shows I've worked on
Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to collaborate on films and series that have reached screens all over the world. From epic creatures and galactic heroes to musical adventures and wild robots, each project has been an opportunity to tell stories through movement and simulation.
Some of the most special ones for me have been:
GOAT, Kpop Demon Hunters, The Wild Robot, Kung Fu Panda 4, Trolls 3, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Thor: Love and Thunder, Ms. Marvel, among others.
🗂️CFX Workshop Syllabus for Houdini - Season 2!
Generation of secondary motion without heavy simulations. Implementation using CHOPS for quick solutions and Custom solvers in VEX (Hooke's Law) for total rebound control.
Use of matrices Xform and Rest Position To isolate movements. Extraction of central curves using loops and application of inverse transformations for stable fake simulations.
Volume integration Pyro for guiding fabrics. Use of POP Advect by Volumes to transfer real turbulence to Vellum, overcoming the linearity of standard wind in complex environments.
Flow to simulate stepping animations. Detection of keyframes with VEX, spline interpolation for the solver and reverse reconversion to maintain the original cartoon timing.
Violent collision resolution using subshots and prerolls. Use of Velocity Blend and Reference Frames to compensate for inertia and avoid geometric explosions in rapid movements.
Managing fur under clothing. Inflation preroll to avoid initial intersections and post-processing with proximity maps to flatten and shorten the hair under the fabric.
Correction of intersections using VDB and volume sample in VEX. Creation of fake collisions and reactive deformers to avoid the high computational cost of soft bodies.
Technical interface for manage collisions. It allows ignore external collisions or self-collisions dynamically through groups and visibility attributes integrated into the solver.
Procedural curve extraction to create a branch rig. Simulation with Vellum Hair, using gradients of stiffness y Point Deform to enliven the final foliage.
Generate center curves and apply a burst mask. Use a Bend animated for the wind and the Jiggle Deformer (VEX) for the rebound.
Use Scatter to populate base branches and generate a central structure. Apply Vellum Hair with high Plasticity in the grass so that it retains the deformation after wind or interaction.
Simulation in viscous environments cancelling gravity. Use of POP Drag and Damping raised to recreate the resistance and slow movement characteristic of water.
Thrust simulation using and POP Wrangles. We implemented Archimedes' logic in VEX to balance gravity and density, allowing objects to float or sink procedurally.
Simulation with Vellum Cloth for the ears. Implementation of Skin Slide procedural to slide the dermis over the muscle and Wrinkle Deformer to generate dynamic wrinkles through compression.
We'll see the reactive fur simulation Skin Slide. We will analyze why it is vital for the final CFX look, since the skin guides the root of the guides, preventing unrealistic slippage and adding natural movement to the groom.
⚠️ The order of the topics does not indicate the order of the classes, which will be decided according to time, group interest and availability of practical examples.
