Extended Course: Houdini Elements

CGCircuit has announced its brand new course dedicated to the creation of visual effects in Houdini 19.

CGCircuit has launched a new course for those creatives who are interested in producing visual effects in Houdini. The course is prepared and mentored by David Ferreira aka CGMonkeyking, a Generalist and a Senior FX Technical Director at Mackevision.

In this course, the mentor will guide you through the full process of working with Houdini tools for recreating visual effects. David will show you the workflow he uses to create energy FX that interacts with a character.

At the first step, you will prepare the character mesh for particle interaction. Then you'll move on to creating the main source of the blast with all the necessary attributes to generate an energy blast with POPs. After that, the mentor will show you how to work on adding radial blast waves using FLIP. In the end, you'll bring everything together with a mix of render techniques.

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While you obtain the theoretical knowledge and view the practical part of creating the blast, you'll be also exploring some of the Houdini 19.0 updates and receiving tips and tricks for simplifying the interaction with Houdini.

The mentor notes that this course has been designed for beginner-intermediate artists and it's expected that you’re already familiar with the essentials of Houdini.

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Core Topics of the Course:

Optimizing animated geometry caches for Particle simulations
Simulating Particle FX with POPs
Simulating Particle FX with FLIP
Wedging in Houdini 19.0
Controlling Particles movement and behavior
Creating custom velocity fields for particle advection
Combining multiple “simple” FXs to build a more complex result
Custom “electric” arches/lightning with Particles
Using Houdini 19.0 Simulated Sparks
Rendering with Redshift
Shading Particles for energy FX
Lighting with Particles
Lighting and Rendering with Karma in Solaris
Splitting the FX into multiple render passes for total control in Compositing

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The first part of the course will cover a quick overview of the start scene, Robot mesh preparation process, and energy blast creation with a POP network, and POP Forces. During the second chapter of the course, you will go through the process of creating radial blast waves using FLIPs combined with some POP elements. In the third chapter, you'll be using some advanced particle advection and custom Forces to control how the particles behave. After that, you'll produce two more layers for the final effect: Electricity Arches and Sparks. Finalizing the energy blast's look will be accomplished in the final chapter by rendering all the different FX layers in Redshift. At the end of the course, you will explore shading, lighting, and rendering with Karma in Solaris.

"After viewing this course, people can expect to feel confident while creating complex Particle FX with Houdini using some advanced techniques and also rendering those FXs with Redshift and Karma in Solaris.", comments the CGCircuit team.

This Masterclass series is available also to Companies and Schools via a Subscription plan. Check CGCircuit for Teams here.

Also, you may get this course here and check out the courses' overviews and useful tutorials at CGCircuit's Youtube channel.

Extended Course: Houdini Elements - Particles FX

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