Breakdown of Nutcracker

There was a lot of crowd in this one like building up the Mosue King from thousands of tiny mice and the big Tin-Soldier battle. Houdini to the rescue!

Added 2 Bonus Chapters to Crowd for Feature Film in Houdini

Houdini 17 is out and, although less exciting than Vellum, has some nice workflow improvements for creating agent definitions. There are also some improvements to the transition graph in 16.5 that aren’t mentioned in any of my crowd courses, so I decided to add 2 short bonus chapters to Crowds for Feature Film in Houdini that are free for anyone that owns the course.

Check it out over here: Crowds for Feature Film in Houdini

Production tips for Crowds in Houdini, Masterclass at BFX

For anyone interested in our crowd workflows at MPC. This October 3rd, come and join my masterclass about production tips to create CG crowds with Houdini at this year’s BFX Festival from Bournemouth University. I will focus on how to set up production friendly scenes and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that I see a lot of crowd artists' fall into. Get the tickets here

Check out MPC Film Crowd 

Animated Constraints

In this tutorial I’m showing how you can animate the constraint network to gradually break apart an object in a rigid body sim. 

Crowds for Feature Film in Houdini 2

I'm finally finished with the follow up to my crowd course! This time it’s all about ragdolls. It has the same format at the first one, fast paced and short chapters.

In this course you will, among other things, learn how to prepare your agents for ragdoll simulations by setting up collision layers and constraints, how to add dynamics to your crowd without using any shelf tools, how to access the agent rig, how to work with agent attribute arrays, different methods to trigger your agents into ragdolls, how to use motors and how to set up partial ragdolls.

 Learn more here: Crowds for Feature Film 2

Latest Work

I don’t usually post about my work here at the blog, but I’m really proud of what we did for this one and I think the VFX turned out great. Solid crowd shots from both the London office and Singapore. See it while it’s out on the big screen :)

Electric Thingie

A tutorial about how to create a simple electricity thingie rig. Maybe not the most exciting effect, but I’m mostly using it to go through some of the things people have asked me about lately. Hopefully you can get something out of it.

I’ve uploaded the scene file over here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7t9oov7umxmg6ti/electricThingie.hiplc?dl=0