Introduction

Hi everyone, my name is Thibaut Van Waeyenbergh, a junior FX Artist from Antwerp, Belgium, and I currently work as a Tech Runner at DNEG London. Being a recent graduate from Digital Arts and Entertainment, Howest, I’m at the very beginning of my journey. My first experience with 3D took place about a couple of years earlier when I used Cinema 4D for my first little projects. It was at that point when I decided to become an artist.

Learning Houdini

I first encountered Houdini and FX during college about 2 years ago. They had just introduced a course called “VFX Simulations” and as I thought it looked interesting, I decided to follow it. The course was far from perfect since it was the first time it was offered, and I still needed to do a LOT of self-study, but it did give me the right introduction to Houdini Proceduralism and its FX capabilities.

During the summer vacation prior to the final year in college, I made a radical decision. I pushed other software I knew aside (like 3ds Max and Maya) and decided to focus solely on Houdini because it needed a different mindset than most other software. Focusing on crowd simulations in Houdini for my graduation work, I did extensive research to study the software. There are different paths to learning Houdini, from starting with a code-less, small model of a cube, to modeling a fully procedural house right away. The most important thing is to do it all at your own tempo. Start off by understanding its workflow and proceduralism and then move on to the bigger stuff. It’s better to have perfect, small projects than big projects that are unfinished because you don’t know how to push it. And yes, in my opinion, programming is important. Or at least the knowledge of the concept of programming. It will definitely help.