During my internship at RISE Visual Effects Studios and working on Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, I really learned to love the procedural workflow of Houdini. I started doing as much stuff as possible within this software.

Procedural Approach

While I love 3D, some tasks can get pretty repetitive after a while. Sometimes, it is relaxing to hear music and move some polygons around but I find the procedural approach much more engaging. It is like a puzzle, you are problem-solving and trying to find a way to make something fully procedural. This is why I enjoy Houdini and programming so much. They both reward a more technical mindset.

Because a procedural setup often takes more time than a destructive approach it’s not always the right decision to make every asset fully procedural during a movie-production. At home for personal projects, I don't really have time constraints and can challenge myself.

When creating a new project, most of the time I have a loose idea of how I want to approach it. The approach is different for every project. In general, I split the projects into smaller specific tasks and then try to solve each one by one.

Sometimes, I already know how I can achieve certain effects in Houdini (from tutorials or previous projects) or I might think of a way to make it possible. Then, I have to figure out if there are already nodes that can solve my problem or if I have to use Python or Houdini’s expression language VEX to build custom solutions.

Working procedurally is so interesting because there are many ways to solve each problem and every artist might solve them in a different way. Exchanging knowledge with other artists is a great way to learn new techniques and workflows.

Even if some approaches don't turn out to work as intended you can always go back a few steps and try another one. Because everything is procedural, you don't really lose anything trying an idea.