FXPHD – HOU223 – Taking Houdini Digital Assets to the Next Level

Digital Assets are at the center of everyday use of Houdini. You have probably created HDAs and also downloaded some created by others. The goal of this course is to analyze what makes a good HDA and how you can apply these concepts to create more robust Digital Assets. As a follow up to HOU140 - Houdini FX Tool Building Foundation, this intermediate course assumes some basic knowledge of Houdini and how HDAs work.

The whole course revolves around a realistic production scenario that involves creating a Digital Asset for creating roof tiles on a variety of buildings. The first classes will go over the creation of the user interface and present some techniques for making more user friendly HDAs. The next classes will continue the development by improving the performance and the iteration times of the HDA as well as best practices for organizing the internals of the HDA, validating input attributes and performing error checks, documenting and debugging.

The last part of the course will cover tips for updating HDAs and introduce 2 new techniques for automating tests that check the integrity of the HDA by performing geometry and render comparisons in Python. The last classes will cover some more Python tips and tricks that can be applied to HDAs, which will lead to the finalization of the roof tiles generator project. By the end of this course you will have learned enough techniques to create better, more reliable and more user friendly HDAs.

Jeronimo Maggi started his career as a 3D generalist and has been working with Houdini as an FX TD on feature films for the last 8 years. He worked for several years in the education field teaching Houdini and currently works in Walt Disney Animation Studios as a General TD.

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