Learn How to Craft Game Effects using Houdini 15.5 & UE4.12, A guide for experienced film vfx artists to start their journey into real time graphics..
Course Description:
UPDATE: While I certainly appreciate that people are still regularly signing up and learning from this content, I’d like to make it clear that this is legacy content that was published in 2016 using versions of Houdini and Unreal which are not the current industry standards used today. I’m leaving the course available as there are still insights (particularly in the explanation of how vertex animation works) that are beneficial to dig into for an expanded understanding of how to work with 3D assets. At the time that this was made, it was not yet a popular workflow. The expected way that an artist might carry out this work today has changed – though understanding the inner workings illustrated here may still be beneficial.
This 45 Minute Lecture was originally given to the Vancouver Houdini User Group in August 2016. It is a talk that was designed for an audience familiar with feature film visual effects workflows, specifically those which use Houdini. The goal is to increase awareness of limitations in real-time game environments, and to help film makers take steps towards transitioning into interactive media.
Feature film effects artists are typically used to working with millions or particles, polygons, and voxels. While it’s acceptable for a render farm to chew through heavy data over the course of several hours for film; current game platforms are not designed with this kind of geometry in mind. It’s up to the effects artist to understand this and produce visuals that are as light-weight as they are beautiful so that game engines can spend their efforts on more than just the visuals.
This is not designed to be a step-by-step tutorial for making a “pretty” effect, but rather a general purpose guide geared at introducing a broad topic. If you are interested in transitioning from film to games, this talk may be useful as a primer as we’ll introduce concepts such as: sprite sheets, power of two dimensions, texture packing, particle trimming, letting the GPU handle transformations, and vertex animation. Topics are introduced in a way that should build upon concepts that are already familiar to those with training in the motion picture discipline. All examples in this lecture are given using Houdini 15.5.523 and Unreal Engine 4.12.5.
The example files may be downloaded and examined at the student’s own leisure.
