Intro to Character FX in Houdini using Vellum and TOPs

Hello Everyone!

My name is Ryan Ruiz

I work as Senior Creature FX Artist in Feature Animation and VFX for the past 8 years.

Most Recently I worked at Framestore and had the chance to work on the Gorge, Deadpool & Wolverine, and How to Train your Dragon.

Welcome to my Intro to Character FX Course using Houdini, Vellum, and TOPs.

This course will cover a modular approach to building a CFX SimRig for Muscles, Fat,

Skin, and Cloth.

After That we will look into how to procedurally set up our flipbooks for each pass and generate a contact sheet that can be submitted to dailies to receive notes on our first pass.

At the same, we will go over some methods to utilize TOPs, to daisy chain, or stack all of our simulation tasks in order utilizing the previous stage's cache as an input.

And Finally, we will go over Houdini Digital Asset / HDA / creation process, select some key parameters to promote so other artists utilize them for shot work.

And last and my favorite part, is going over how to utilize TOPs to generate all of our sim, renders, and contact sheet generation, by clicking 2 buttons on our HDA, to basically get a first CFX iteration without any manual work needed. Which is a great way on production for films whenever you start a new shot.

With that said, lets get into it!