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Rebelway has shared a new course for VFX artists, that covers an advanced look into creating incredible magical FX inside Houdini.
'Magical FX can be some of the most exciting VFX simulations to create inside Houdini. There's just something about their abstract design and unique colors that make them pop on screen.' says the Rebelway team.
The course is prepared and mentored by Hunter Williams, an FX artist at Luma Pictures. He has worked on several feature film projects, where he continues to learn and hone his craft. Additionally, he works on personal projects to explore new techniques in the field of FX and technical direction. Hunter graduated with honors at NYU Tisch with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in May of 2017. While at Tisch, he pursued his passion for cinematography by assisting in on-set production and directing documentaries, notably multiple short films while living in Cuba for 3 months. After graduating, he started full-time employment with Trident Post Production in Boston, handling visual-effects supervision for commercial projects and coordinating off-site freelancers.
In this pro-level course, you'll learn from Hunter the process of creating high-end magical FX for film and TV. Using his experience, Hunter will show you the techniques he has learned to create impressive VFX inside Houdini. Along the way, you'll learn how to create energy, smoke, whisps, pulses, and more. In the final weeks, you'll bring it all together to create a scene that rivals that found in your favorite film or TV productions.
This 9 weeks course covers:
1. Procedural Motion Concepts: Learn basic and advanced concepts that can be used to achieve different magical looks, Create a system to animate thousands of unique electrical strands procedurally.
2. Electricity Tech Development: Step by step development of an electricity setup, Work on secondary effects based on the electricity/lightning, Shading.
3. Environment and Atmospherics: Create the shot that students will work on for the remainder of the workshop, Learn the workflow with atmospheric elements, Learn techniques to optimize layout in Houdini to iterate faster.
4. Thrusters Tech Development: Step by step development of the thruster setup, Explore areas for additional work for making it your own, Work on the secondary effects.
5. Energy Tech Development: Step by step recreation of the advect by volume dop to add additional functionality, Create procedural approaches without simulation, Talk about additional passes and ideas that can push the final look
6. Shotwork and FX Rendering: Discuss every shot in the promo to display how each setup could be adjusted for shot-specific challenges, Learn techniques to optimize rendering – discuss technical limitations.
7. Extra FX - Sparks, Dust, AOVs: Creation of sparks setup using H19 Sparks-Trail node and adding additional features, Additional Aovs that could be useful in comp, Tweaking the look.
8. Volumetric portal and Volume Deformation: Use procedural motion techniques previously learned to create a cloud portal, Learn volume deformation techniques including the new H19 volume deform workflow
The last week of the course will be dedicated to compositing: bring all of this together and step-by-step composite the thruster shot from the promo, go through all shots in the promo and talk about technical issues and custom solutions.
You may get this course here. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.