Remi Marchand

Top 10 tips ((Cheat Sheet)) for USD Rendering useful for Tech Artists & Pipeline TDs Use it anywhere you need headless, automated, Hydra-based USD rendering without opening Houdini. 1. Basic Render Render a USD file using Karma (default delegate): husk scene.usd 2. Render a Frame Range husk scene.usd -f 1 100 And to point to output path: husk scene.usd -f 1 100 -o /renders/shot1/beauty.$F4.exr 3. Switch Render Delegate Render using Karma XPU: husk -R KarmaXPU scene.usd Render with Storm (fast preview): husk -R HdStorm scene.usd And you can add any Hydra delegate (Arnold, RenderMan, 3Delight if installed). 4. Override Render Settings Change a render var (AOV) directly: husk -set camera /path/to/cameraPrim Override resolution: husk scene.usd -xres 1920 -yres 1080 5. Render Specific Camera husk scene.usd -C /World/camera1 6. Add AOVs Render with ego-defined AOV (example: nrm, depth): husk scene.usd -A nrm -A depth -o /renders/aov.$AOV.$F4.exr 7. Generate a Preview Movie husk scene.usd -f 1 120 -o preview.$F4.jpg Use ffmpeg afterwards: ffmpeg -r 24 -i preview.%04d.jpg preview.mov 8. Progressive Rendering Good for quick review: husk scene.usd -progress 9. Use Husk in PDG Inside a ROP Fetch TOP or USD Render TOP: Set “Command” to: husk @usdfile@ -f @frame@ -o @output@ PDG distributes to farm automatically. 10. Debug Mode husk scene.usd --verbose or husk scene.usd --trace #Houdini3D #USD #Husk #KarmaXPU #PipelineTD #TechArt #Proceduralism #PDG #Hydra #VFXPipeline #RenderFarm #CGWorkflow #OpenToWork

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After Effects Beta v26 just leveled up! - Create Native 3D objects - Add .sbsar textures DIRECTLY to 3D objects with one click - Animate those same textures - And so much more! Over 1300 textures are available via the Substance 3D Community Assets website, even if you don’t have a substance addon package for your plan. This scene used those new 3D shapes, one texture, and a few quick effects like Magic Bullet, vignette, and curves. Can’t wait to create more stuff now! 🥳 #3d #motiondesign #vfx #animation #adobe #design

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Real-time volumetric clouds rendered in Unreal with raymarching using Houdini VDBs written to pseudovolume textures. I plan to explore adding some additional features like sdf mesh shadows and animated noise for a true timelapse effect. #shaders #raymarching #hlsl #volumetric #texture #unrealengine #realtime #render #sidefx #houdini #3D #CGI #techart #procedural

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⁉️Did you know that 3D Artists are half Designers and half Engineers? ⁉️ - Because 3D art sits right at the intersection of visual storytelling and technical systems. You’re not just making something look good—you’re making sure it works inside a complex digital pipeline. That’s why 3D artists naturally become half designer, half engineer. Here is a neat example of how "Art + Math" is required for a result. Link for High-res - https://lnkd.in/dfPehuaX

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Anyone else feel like lookdev takes longer deciding than actually doing? I keep running into this loop: tweak → render → wait → forget what I was testing → tweak again. I’ve been messing with the Live Render node in Houdini 21 to see if it helps reduce how often I break flow during lookdev, especially when dialing materials and lighting together. It’s not a magic switch, but it does change the iteration rhythm inside Solaris. I ended up recording a breakdown of how I’m using it in a simple setup. Link’s in the comments if you’re curious. Curious how others are handling lookdev iteration right now.

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Launched a new unreal engine editor tool on fab today to generate landscape-conforming geometry on the fly. 🚀 More info: https://lnkd.in/eFkyUpns

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Anchor Points in Adobe Substance 3D are soooo handy! Did you know that you can use Anchor Points to control multiple layers from ONE central layer - no matter how nested they are. Works for Color, Roughness, Height, and more. Way cleaner workflow for stylized texturing and no more digging through folders to manually adjust colors!

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An R&D study on droplet simulation and surface shading. Focused on realism, material interaction, and micro-detail behavior. #3D #CGI #RND #simulation #liquidFX #droplets #cinema4d #octanerender #shading #texturing #lookdev #bezierstudio #3danimation #c4d

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Transferring 3D movement into AE for mobile creatives shouldn't require a chain of three different 3D programs. I was looking for a way to skip the Unreal → C4D/3ds Max → AE pipeline. After a half-day session with Gemini, I created a simple tool to do exactly that: ✅ Direct 3D to 2D motion transfer. ✅ No plugins needed. ✅ Streamlined workflow for mobile ad production. Have you developed any custom tools or workflow shortcuts using AI? I’d love to hear what you’ve built to make your life easier! #VFX #Animation #UnrealEngine #AfterEffects #Efficiency #AI #CreativeTech

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How to get sculpt-level 3D assets from AI without pulling your pipeline apart. Regardless of how much ease AI has brought to production systems, there still tends to be a tad of inconsistency throughout it all ⚔️ And because of that, producers do a full rerun and break their pipelines in pieces. Tencent has removed a vital ‘excuse’ for mediocre 3D AI workflows by releasingHY 3D Studio 1.2, and it is now in public beta. PartGen 1.5 pushes component partitioning to 1536³ (up from 1024³) ♻️ → Brush based control means you can finally edit components with surgical precision. → Shape adherence is far better, so intricate models actually hold their structure. → Texture fidelity and colour accuracy are dramatically improved, and input views doubled from 4 to 8, which stabilises reconstruction. The real question is: How do you use tools like this without creating yet another isolated experiment that never becomes a system 🤔 Here is how you can implement this in a real pipeline: 1️⃣ Anchor HY 3D Studio to asset classes: Ideal teams attach tools to specific, named asset classes, such as E-commerce hero models, high value game props, or modular environment kit. For each class, define an explicit acceptance criteria: → Geometry quality threshold (where 1536³ actually matters) → Texture realism levels (what “good enough” means in your context) → Tolerance for manual clean up time per asset Then your operators know exactly when HY 3D Studio is a fit and when it is not. 2️⃣ Decouple ‘control’ from ‘craft’ in your workflow: PartGen 1.5 is control: brush based partitioning, better shape adherence, clear component boundaries. Treat that control as its own layer in your pipeline: One step is purely about structure → Use PartGen to define clean components, enforce naming, and lock how assets are segmented. Another step is about look and feel → Use the improved texture fidelity and 8 view reconstruction to match brand materials and lighting references. This is how you start moving from cool demo to reusable asset infrastructure. 3️⃣ Turn HY 3D Studio into a repeatable node in your system: this can become a powerful node inside that system if you treat it like this: Standardise multi view capture → 8 view input is only useful if your team always knows which 8 angles to feed for each asset class. Create preset profiles per use case → Partition settings, brush rules, texture expectations for “retail product”, “cinematic hero prop”, “mid distance environment piece”. Log before / after data → Asset type, time to first usable output, manual clean up minutes, issues found downstream in engine or DCC tools. Over a few projects, this builds a data spine around your 3D production: You know where HY 3D saves time, where it creates risk, and which combinations of inputs ship production ready results That is the real unlock. Your production system decides whether it becomes the competitive advantage 🔓

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A recent Chips project for Substance 3D this time exploring Unreal Engine’s physics and Take Recorder tools for animation. Physics handled the potato animation and helped scatter props like limes, peppers, and chips across the scene. It’s a quick and reliable way to add realism while avoiding manual placement or intersections. https://lnkd.in/eypRRAtp #Substance3D #UnrealEngine #3DArt #LookDevelopment #PhysicsSimulation #CGI #TechArt

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Some quickie 3D experiments in Rive w/ Scripting. Should be fun fleshing this one out a bit! Got configurable properties set up for: - wireframe stroke color, thickness, opacity - face color, opacity - XYZ rotation - auto rotation speed - click & drag + flick interactivity, friction, amplitude - lights with XYZ properties - ambient light, specular intensity, highlight color - backface culling - polyhedron dual structure modes - subdivisions - and more! Hoping to break this one down more in the near future and share some files on Rive's marketplace!

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Viscous Motion — Fluid R&D in Houdini Experimenting with FLIP fluids of different viscosities — watching how thick, syrupy layers blend with faster, liquid streams. Also explored procedural textures in COPs and animated UVs, creating evolving color patterns that flow with the motion. A small study in controlled chaos. 👉 More about the project on https://lnkd.in/dC8YNxsR #Houdini #Karma #Simulation #RND #MotionDesign #Procedural #3DArt

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Digital costumes often miss realism. Virtual actors need more than a texture wrap. They need clothes that perform. This Unreal Engine piece details how integrating CLO and Marvelous Designer moves beyond simple asset transfer. It's about full cloth physics and material interaction. A shift from prop to performance. For filmmakers and creative entrepreneurs, this means: 1. Real-world garment patterns translate directly to virtual characters. 2. Iteration cycles for costume design shrink dramatically. 3. Visual fidelity for MetaHumans reaches new highs for virtual production. The tools are here. The craft adapts. Check the full article here: https://lnkd.in/g4x4vfyg

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The next version of Cyclops, 5.2.28, is available from the Apple App Store.  Object Anchors In addition to Image and GPS Anchors, Cyclops now supports Object Anchors as an additional tool to Save & Load CG-to-Real World alignment. You can scan a real object or a small area to create an Object Target. Then use that Object Target to create an Object Anchor that stores the relationship between your CG scene and the real-world object. Then, whenever Cyclops sees that object or area, it can automatically realign the CG World to the Real World. Panorama Asset Cyclops now includes a panorama asset that you can use to add a backdrop to a scene. You can import a panorama image from your device and use it as a 360 spherical panorama in Cyclops. Cyclops supports 8, 16 & 32-bit EXR, HDR, PNG, or JPG images. Adjust the exposure, tint, brightness, and more. Cinema Crane Assets You can now add a professional cinema crane to your scene. Cyclops features eight cranes from TechnoCrane. Use the crane assets to visualise the cinema crane in real-world locations. The cranes are adjustable. Arm swing, boom, and extension are all controllable. You can download the cranes directly in Cyclops from the main menu > Help & About > Sample Files. I actually uploaded this new version back in October but never got to posting about it as I wanted to create some tutorials of the new features.  This is one area that I've really struggled with as it takes a lot of effort for me to create the tutorial videos. I'm just not able to record them in a single go or off the cuff. I end up writing out a script, recording my audio, and editing the audio. Then I need to shoot all the video pieces, and then edit it all together.  I often struggle to figure out a good place to shoot the video that can really showcase a real-world example of the feature and doesn't just look like my apartment. I have stuff from using Cyclops on-set, but no way I can get that cleared to use in my tutorials.  I kept waiting till I'd have time to create some good tutorials... but it's a new year and F it. I'll just post and continue to build features for the app wihtout the tutorials.  Not sure if that is a good strategy or not... but my time is limited, and it's only me, and i much prefer working on development than creating tutorials. What do people think? Are tutorials really needed? Do people actually watch them?

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Quick R&D I tested to compare performance between Masked Trees and Full Geometry Trees. Go over the pros and cons of using opaque mesh trees, share my custom Houdini tool that automatically generates opaque meshes, and finish with a performance test. #gameart #optimization #houdini #unreal

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[𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 "𝐎𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐁𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠" 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐲𝐚 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐁𝐢𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐭] I’ve been experimenting with terrain normal blending using Maya's Bifrost. This is a classic procedural technique often seen in the Houdini community to seamlessly blend assets (like tree trunks) with uneven terrain, but being able to achieve this entirely within Maya feels incredibly empowering! By sampling the ground topology using closest_locations and handling the data via face_vertex_index, I built a setup that dynamically calculates the height weight between Start and End points to smoothly Lerp the normals. I absolutely love these kinds of subtle, "under-the-hood" techniques. They may seem simple at first glance, but they dramatically boost asset visual quality while keeping the scene and workflow lightweight. Seeing Houdini-level procedural logic natively integrated into Maya via Bifrost expands our pipeline options immensely. Next, I’m planning to bake this weight into vertex colors as a mask to drive dynamic texture blending in the shader! #Maya #Bifrost #TechnicalArtist #EnvironmentArt #3DCG #Autodesk #Procedural #TechArt

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🧮 De-mystifying the Pixel Processor in Substance Designer Chapter 2: Grid Generation Recreating a grid like the Tile Generator can do inside the Pixel Processor is a great practice to understand fundamentals of image processing. By scaling your UVs and taking the fractional part, you repeat a pattern across the surface. Then, by centering and stepping the result, you get a clean, evenly spaced grid, fully controllable in both X and Y. 🧱 Horizontal? Vertical? Brick layout? No problem. However how to get there with different shapes is going to be a different chapter. #madewithsubstance #substance3d #substancedesigner #pixelprocessor

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🙌 Making cool tile patterns in Substance Designer feels way harder than it should for beginners. Especially this 3D Cube. But I managed to make it easier for you! Let me show you: 💡Start with a square and rotate it 45° (Safe Transform Grayscale). 💡 In a Transformation 2D, edit the Matrix values to stretch it: X1 = 1.250 / Y2 = 2.200. 💡Feed it into a Splatter Circular (Grayscale), set 3 shapes, and add a bit of Luminance Variation. 💡Send that into a Tile Sampler (Grayscale), set Offset = 0.5, then tweak Size to dial the pattern. And now you’ve got a clean “cube/diamond” tile pattern you can reuse for walls, floors, trim or anything. But if you need more help building graphs like this (or learning how to control them fast), I have a place for you. There is a Free Discord Server called Future Material Artists where professionals of the industry help students grow and learn. 📍 We are waiting for you here: https://lnkd.in/d9bKMM-f #3d #vfx #texturing #TextureArtist #3dtexturing #digitalartist #substance3ddesigner #3dartist #gameartist #gameart #adobe

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