FXPHD

More and more applications are starting to support USD and most studios are in some way using it in their pipelines. USD is here to stay and it is slowly becoming the industry standard. This course is meant for artists who want to get familiar with how USD works to better understand the pipelines that they are working in. It will cover all the basics you need to know about USD in general, and then it will focus more on Houdini and its new LOP context introduced in version 18.0 which allows artists to procedurally edit and create USD files.

Particle motion, simulation, behaviour, and theory are at the core of the FX artist skillset. This course will challenge you with various particle and motion exercises and the construction of a non-human crowd.

This course covers the basics of VEX, Houdini's expression language, as well as how to use Houdini's Python API. We will look at the strengths and weaknesses and when you should favour one or the other. VEX is an essential tool for any technical director, so we will cover all the basics starting from its syntax, the difference between VEX and VEXpressions and how it can be used in SOPs and DOPs to optimize your systems.

Getting volumetric clouds of dust and particulates moving and rendering correctly can often prove a challenging task for juniors and seniors alike. This course focuses on generating great looking volumetric dust based on impacts and preparing you to be able to adapt these types of simulations to art direction.

This course covers how to sculpt and perfect an extremely common aspect of most FX shot work: the creation of secondary particles and the technical and creative processes behind it. Appropriate size distributions, shaping, motion, orientations, and more will be covered during the course.

Solid geometry foundations are the key to being an efficient junior artist, a solid mid-level artist, and diving into advanced setups as a senior. A good knowledge and understanding of proceduralism, vector math, rotation, and population, and look development will benefit any Houdini FX TD at any level. This course will guide you through two procedural generation exercises of wasp nest formations. Starting from a thorough analysis of reference and a set of creative objectives, you will use Houdini's proceduralism to produce a completely procedural as well as realistic end result.

Part two of the course focuses on shading, lighting, rendering, and other technical aspects of Mantra aspect to enable us to render this shot. It includes an exploration of NVIDIA OptiX technology in Mantra for denoising renders, as well as the use of LPEs,and utility AOVs to help in creating the composite in Nuke.

This course is the first of a two part course covering terrain generation in Houdini using height fields. If you are a concept artist, a digital matte painter, or environment artist this course is for you.

This course, taught by Andrew Lowell, introduces rigid body dynamics in Houdini. Houdini's entry into realistic physics started with rigid body dynamics, and it has remained one of the most aggressive growth areas both in the software as well as VFX as a whole. This quick start will introduce foundations in those concepts to get up and running quickly, whether embarking on learning or transferring knowledge from other packages.

This series of short lessons is designed to get a new Houdini user up and running with a set of core fundamentals. Although the examples are basic enough for new users to follow along, they touch on concepts which will carry all the way through to advanced setups by learning how to direct the flow of geometry data, and important concepts in noise, vectors and rotations, population, and simulation.

Learning Houdini can seem like a daunting task, especially if it's the first time you are using procedural workflows. The many different ways in which one effect can be achieved combined with the vast amount of nodes and low-level manipulation of 3D geometry that Houdini offers is very hard to understand in the beginning. If you want to build a strong foundation not only in learning the software but also in understanding how to work procedurally, this is the course for you.

Golaem Crowd is an artist friendly crowd simulation tool for Maya used in production by a long and growing list of visual effect studios. This introductory course assumes no previous knowledge of Golaem Crowd, but covers all aspects of the software and is based on direct production experience, so even existing users should find something new to learn.

This course uses multiplane creative techniques to help teach artists how to create effects in Fusion. Since the early 1930’s multiplane has been a fundamental tool for creating the illusion of depth in 2D animation. With the advent of digital technology, the physical constraints of being restricted to a rostrum with a complex rig supporting heavy sheets of glass have been removed, opening up the possibility of combining other 3D elements, such as particle effects and 3D shapes.

Rony Soussan is back with the second in our series of introductory Fusion courses. [...]Read More... from New course: Fusion Fundamentals, Part 2

This course provides artists with an in-depth overview of the different workflows available in Flame and shows their advantages and disadvantages along the way. Furthermore, it equips artists with a range of tricks and strategies to avoid the many pitfalls that escalating projects can create.

This, the second part of a course taught by 2017 Flame Award winner Mihran Stepanyan, is devoted to a very important theme: high-end chroma keying in features and commercials. This course covers keying Alexa and RED footage, utilizing the Modular Keyer and Action's 3D compositing environment.

This, the first part of a course taught by 2017 Flame Award winner Mihran Stepanyan, is devoted to a very important theme: high-end chroma keying in features and commercials. In these courses you'll learn about light, color, and channel separation -- the basics of traditional film keying -- and then you will be shown how to practically apply this information and more via techniques in the digital world.

Beauty Work has always been a hallmark of Flame compositing and is required on more and more projects and increasing resolutions lead to ever tougher challenges. If you think that there is more to beauty retouching than “Blur-It, Glow-It, Ship-It”, then this course is just for you.

This course will be shot-based (footage will be provided and available to use) and will explore how to really marry together live action and cg footage. We will also look at problematic shots and explore ways to get them across the line. Besides being focused on comping and keying techniques this course is more about how to take a shot from just okay to the next level.

This course covers advanced compositing techniques in Flame and Flare, taking examples from shots done for Cosmos, A Space/Time Odessy. All of the work will take place in Batch. Material to be covered includes color science, advanced keying (hard shots), camera tacking, particle system, sapphire sparks, and applying advanced compositing science to flame.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Flame, we're bringing in a variety of Flame (and Smoke) artists to share projects and knowledge which they find particularly interesting. So much has changed in the software over the last several years, sometimes the best way to see what you've missed is by watching others work. The course will feature five different artists over the duration of the term. Profs include Randy McEntee (The Mill, NYC), Brian Mulligan (WTHR-TV, Indianapolis), Victor Wolansky, and others.

Picking up from the first part of this two-part series, this course delves even deeper into the visual effects capabilities of Flame. From working on original footage to creating something entirely from scratch, many aspects of the software will be covered to provide you with a solid foundation of knowledge and tips.

This course aims to demystify Flame and provide a solid foundation in all the different areas in which Flame can be used. Starting with media management and editing, you'll quickly dive into the rabbit hole of node-based compositing, utilizing many tools unique to Flame.

This course, from CG supervisor Charles Chorein, is the second in our series of Substance Designer and Painter courses utilizing our cyber soldier model. By the end of the course you will be able to master the principle of texturing and lookdev with Substance Designer and Painter and be able to set up a lookDev scene in Maya for production.

This course, from CG supervisor Charles Chorein, dives into RealityCapture and the photogrammetry process with photos taken with a camera, helicopter and drone shots. At the end of the course you will be able to create a mesh, UV’s, UDIMs, and texture and render in Maya/Arnold.

This course, from CG supervisor Charles Chorein from Dneg London who dives into Clarisse and the power of scattering. We will cover the different aspect of scattering in Clarisse, NVIDIA Optix and denoiser, Cryptomatte and LightPath Expression for our multi lights.

This course, from CG supervisor Charles Chorein of Dneg London, dives into an introduction of Substance Designer and Painter with our cyber soldier head model. By the end of the course you will be able to prepare an asset in Maya, export to Substance Designer, pass everything to Substance Painter, and then reconnect everything in Maya.

This course, taught by Charles Chorein, will get you up to speed in Clarisse. By the end of the course you will be able to export a mesh from Maya, set up the Clarisse scene, assign shaders, texture an object, and Combiners to prepare your Clarisse scene.

This introductory course, taught by Ludovic Iochem, covers Adobe Photoshop and the most important tools and techniques used for digital matte painting in a production environment. An overview of the software and interface is followed by moving on to covering the main tools used such as Brushes, Clone tools, and the Free Transform command. Next comes the most important techniques, such as grading, extraction, and integration of new elements.