Intro to Houdini for FX Artists

This workshop has been completely updated with an entire new project that involves a building destruction and lots of particle based, smoke, pyro and rbd FX.
This new content is going to be used as an example to show students how the provided knowledge can be used to create a finished fx shot.
This new content will also be used to provide updates to everything Houdini 18 has to offer.
Due to this update and extra content the workshop is now much bigger and denser, approximately 14 weeks packed onto 10 weeks and we will provide guiding video on how to work through the content effectively.
The goal of this workshop is to get someone who never used Houdini before to become comfortable with the application and it’s various layers as-well producing high quality FX.
Notes: we are still working on the content and we may add or remove few topics depending on what we think is best for the student.
The promo trailer uses a lot of nuke compositing and in this workflow we will show a simple composite of everything, a more advanced/dedicate nuke workshop will cover compositing these types of shots/fx in more details.

Description:
This course is designed for people who have a good understanding of CG and interested in gaining a full understanding of Houdini and how to properly utilize it’s capacity to create particles FX, water simulation, destruction and volume simulation.The course will also cover in depth how to render the various FX elements and how to composite them using Houdini COPs
We will be creating a variety of FX and with each topic we will cover a specific part of Houdini and learn how to work with a handful of nodes
We will have an interior scene to start with where we will design various particle while learning how create complex visuals and understand how particle simulation works
We will then continue and start choreographing the destruction of this environment and learn how to fracture geometry and use Bullets
Once we destroy our environment we will create a huge flooding to understand and learn how water simulation works in Houdini
Then we will learn how to use volume and smoke simulation to create various smoke based FX to enhance what we’ve created in week 2
We will learn how to shade and render a variety of FX, including particles, volumes and water using mantra
After all the fx creation and rendering we will learn how to composite all these passes using Houdini COPs.
By the end of the 8th week the student should acquired a very deep understanding of how Houdini works and be able to create and render Particles FX, water simulation, destruction.

Disclaimer:
This workshop contains lot more information and the weekly breakdown is just the highlights.
Assignments and weekly lecture are very very demanding and can be challenging to new Houdini comers.
It is required that the student have a very good CG background in shading and lighting.

WEEK1 –
Intro to proceduralism and Houdini’s interface
Maya vs Max vs Houdini, transition and differences
Intro to Houdini contexts
Intro to vex and pointvops
How to get the most out of the workshop
A deeper look at the various fx to be created and how to plan for the various assignment
Hardware requirement
NEW: Houdini 18, new features and what we should focus on
NEW: A look at the new FX Building project.
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WEEK2 —
Intro to pops
An introduction to Designing FX
Timing & Layering
Create a simple procedural system that uses path finding to create various particles streams
Create various FX elements using POPs
Particles Caching and optimization
NEW: FX Energy design and prototyping the look
NEW: Simulation setup
NEW: Guiding particles and creating intelligent paths and Colliders
NEW: Shockwave design, approach and execution

WEEK3 —
Intro to Houdini volumes and vdb manipulation.
Intro to Dops and smoke solver
Create various smoke elements to enhance all the particles FX created week 2
Volume caching and optimization
NEW: Creating magical explosion
NEW: Adding more FX layers to the shockwave
NEW: Using smoke simulation to enhance particle simulation

WEEK4 —-
Intro to mantra
Intro to shading in mantra
Shading all the particles FX previously created
Rendering the environment and setting up all the passes need to render our particles FX
Intro to cops in Houdini
NEW: Buildings, streets and environment rendering
NEW: Initial particle rendering
NEW: Introduction To Compositing

WEEK5 —–
Intro to Bullets and constraints
Fracturing using voronoi and boolean
What is convex decomposition
Edge displacement and high-res interior
Create the constraint
Simulate the rbd
Caching the rbd and optimisation
Setup a workflow for using lowres/higer geometry for simulation vs rendering
NEW: Houdini 16/17 and 18 and how to transition
NEW: When to use sop level solvers vs dop level solvers
NEW: Creating the building destruction setup
NEW: Building destruction setup and tweaking

WEEK6 ——
Create various debris systems using particles and bullets.
Create smoke trail simulation using pops and smoke solver
Create a smoke sim to use as an air field for particle advection.
NEW: Adding debris trails for buildings to enhance the overall visual

WEEK7 NEW——
NEW: Rendering all the additional elements needed
NEW: Balancing and tweaking.
NEW: Putting everything together

WEEK8 ——
Intro to flipfluids in Houdini
Prepping the geometry for flip fluids and collision
Create Custom forces to enhance the flip fluid sim
Create the Highres sim
Meshing in Houdini
Intro to whitewater in Houdini
Create whitewater source
Create a highres foam simulation including, bubbles, spray and foam.
NEW: Houdini 18 workflow/changes and how to transitio