Stephen Candell

Stop struggling with monolithic meshes in Solaris! 🛑 📦 Transitioning from Houdini SOPs to Solaris (USD) can be frustrating if your geometry doesn't come across with the right hierarchy. If you import a complex asset and it shows up as a single "mesh" primitive, you lose the granular control needed for high-end Look-Dev and Lighting. In my latest tutorial, I break down the SOP to LOP workflow specifically for splitting OBJ geometry into discrete USD meshes. Key Takeaways: ✅ Proper SOP Prep: Using attributes to define USD paths before export. ✅ Primitive Control: Why separate meshes are "stronger" for material overrides. ✅ Pipeline Efficiency: Organizing your Scene Graph for cleaner asset management. Whether you are a Lead Artist or just starting with USD, mastering how meshes are recognized in the Stage is a game-changer for your workflow. 📺 Watch the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gARkGzgq #Houdini #Solaris #USD #VFX #LookDev #SideFX #LightingArtist #Pipeline #3DArt #SRS_PICTORIAL

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Ambience System update 0.2.1 is a big step forward 🤯 This version adds a dedicated editor tools module inside Unreal Engine, making the workflow much faster and cleaner. Now the system includes: ✅Ambience System Tools window A central place to manage the ambience setup directly from the editor. ✅Level summary Quick view of managers, zones, portals, emitters and profiles used in the current level. ✅Editor validation Run validation before pressing Play and find setup issues earlier. ✅FMOD Distance Preview tools Refresh all 3D emitter distance previews from one place. ✅Selection and issue-finding tools Find and select ambience actors faster in large levels. This update makes the plugin feel much more like a real production tool. The goal is simple: better control, faster setup, fewer mistakes, and a stronger workflow for game audio and level design. More improvements are coming 🔜 #UnrealEngine #FMOD #GameAudio #TechnicalAudio #SoundDesign #GameDevelopment #AudioTools #IndieGameDev #AmbienceSystem #AmbienceSystemEditor

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Here's the Rive rig overview from my last post. I don't know why that post blew up (The engagement from that post isn't earth-shattering, but almost 2k reactions are already a lot for me 😅) Maybe there's something about the solution, or the output is nice to look at, or a bit of both. A lot of people have asked for a tutorial (by a lot, I mean about 4 😂), so here's a quick breakdown. It's not a full-blown tutorial, but it's the quickest one I can compile. I'll probably make a detailed tutorial in the future. Honestly, I was surprised by the solution's output. And the solution is really simple and obvious, now that I think of it, I just haven't thought of it until now. I have worked with many rigs before (in After Effects), but Rive's built-in joystick and the ability to select a target for the handle are so intuitive and flexible that they enable solutions like this.

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Check out the latest Weekly Wrangle interview with Tidals Chan - FX artist for Path of Exile at Grinding Gear Games. In this, we talk about gamedev, Tidals story, and how to align your skills for success if you're interested in making real time vfx. https://lnkd.in/g4CjWQ5X #sidefx #vfx #poe2 #3d #cgi #animation

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On March 24th, Epic had layoffs. One of the many people impacted was Matt Cordner, a key member of our VFX team. This is about who he actually was, not just what he did.     Matt was our Sr Technical FX Artist. On paper that means he owned the pipeline infrastructure that kept the team from constantly depending on engineering. In practice it meant that whenever something broke between art and tech, Matt was already three steps ahead of it.     He asked good questions, which sounds like a small thing but it isn't. He'd go into technical channels full of engineers and ask exactly the right question, and then when he got the answer he'd come back and share what he'd learned so the next person didn't have to go through the same loop. That habit alone probably saved the team hours we'll never be able to count.     Matt was also a regular blogger. Reading through his posts gave you a full picture of what he was working on and how he thought through problems. The blogs were his way of sharing knowledge, and if you followed them closely enough you almost always knew where his head was at.     On the day he was laid off, he published a blog post titled "Adios Amigos." Unfinished but posted anyway, because leaving something, even something incomplete, was better than leaving nothing. It contained his latest findings on what he was working on, enough for the team to pick up where he left off. That's the most Matt thing any of us can imagine.     He brings deep cross-discipline experience across film, AAA, and live service pipelines, and the kind of instincts you don't find on a resume. If you're hiring for a Sr Technical FX Artist, Tech Art Lead, or pipeline-focused role in games or real-time production, reach out to him. You'd be getting someone who will leave your team better than he found it. #layoffs #gameindustry

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We just hit a milestone I've been building toward for over a year. Today, our real-time character viewer went fully live — animated, interactive, and running inside a custom-built game HUD. 26 motion-captured animation clips. Full 3D environment. All systems confirmed green. This is Abyssum · Genesis Verse — a multi-game universe built on an independent studio stack. No licensed engine dependencies. No outside funding. Every system designed and built in-house: the rendering pipeline, the asset delivery architecture, the UX, the blockchain mint layer, and the AI cognitive framework that powers our oracle characters. What you're seeing in the video is the Forge Confirm interface — the screen a player sees the moment they mint their first character and step onto the stage. That moment is the product. Everything we've built is in service of that 10 seconds. Next: ERC-1155 on-chain mint, wallet connect, and the first speaking oracle character going live on stage. The machine doesn't rest. But today it earned it. #IndieGameDev #WebGL #NFTGaming #AfroFuturism #GameDevelopment #BlockchainGaming #GenerativeAI #3D #MintToDeploy #SimproTitans

Here’s a preview of a new spread from the 2025 Visual Effects & Animation World Atlas featuring a selection of studio openings, closings, mergers, and acquisitions from the past 12 months. (Expand it to full screen if you want to see the details.)   Several high-profile VFX and Animation studios collapsed during this time. But the industry outlook is less straightforward than some of the more attention-grabbing headlines and LinkedIn posts would have you believe.    New studios launched during this same period -- quite a few of them led by teams from companies that closed months, weeks, or even just days, before.    There’s also been plenty of M&A activity (with Dream/Machine FX and PFX among the most active groups). Well-known VFX brands were retired. Studios merged and secured new investment.   While the Atlas looks mainly at countries, cities, and skillsets rather than individual studios, I felt it was important to chart both some of the studios we’ve lost and some of the studios we’ve gained since the 2024 edition. This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you spot a company that’s missing or a date that’s not quite right, please call it out and I’ll fix it before the new edition launches in a couple of weeks’ time. #VFX #animation #vfxatlas

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Performance isn’t polish. It’s architecture. Decide it on Day 0 If you treat performance like an endgame task and skip cross-disciplinary roles, you’re accruing a performance debt with interest. Technical Artists aren’t optional; they turn your ambition into shippable frames. If a game stutters, players remember the pain, not the art. Everyone blames the engine. But the engine didn’t choose ultra-heavy materials or unbounded draw calls. Technical Artists aren’t a last-minute patch; they’re the bridge between vision and frame time. If you want players to remember wonder, not stutter, bring TAs in from day one, define min spec + budgets, and build for that reality.

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"It's weird in the industry right now, because you have these #AAAgames that cost $200 million or however much to make, and so they have to charge $60 or however much it is to sort of have any chance of breaking even. And then you have all these indie games that are coming out at a fraction of that. And a lot of them, actually, have just as much content as the AAA games, and in some cases they're just as good, if not better experiences." https://lnkd.in/g_DCeY8H #SupportIndies #AndyforIndies #gamedevelopment

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Weekly Houdini Tip #3 - Whitewater rendering with Karma XPU For many years, the standard way of rendering whitewater in Houdini has been using the traditional Mantra renderer. Mantra is capable of producing a highly accurate, volumetric "wet" look that closely resembles real whitewater. However, Mantra is now becoming outdated and is being replaced because of its slow performance. As a result, it's important to explore alternative methods for rendering whitewater using Houdini’s modern, fast, and efficient built-in renderer, which is Karma XPU. While Karma XPU cannot interpret the legacy Whitewater shader from the Material Palette (since that shader is built with VEX nodes, which Karma XPU does not support), there are still several viable approaches to achieving a visually acceptable whitewater look using MaterialX-based workflows. 1. Rendering Whitewater points as particles - Adjust the pscale of your whitewater points to keep them small enough for rendering. - Apply a MaterialX Standard Surface shader to the WW points, they will be rendered as small spheres by default - Set Specular Roughness to a low value for a wet, shiny look. - Optionally tweak Transmission, Opacity or add color (you can use the Cd attribute from your points with the "MtlX Geometry Property Value" node) - This is the fastest method - on my machine, a full HD frame rendered in under 1 minute using Karma XPU. 2. Rendering Whitewater as a volume - Convert your whitewater points to a volume using nodes like "Volume Rasterize Particles", "Volume Rasterize Attributes", "VDB from Particles" - Apply a "Karma Uniform Volume" or "Karma Pyro material" and adjust Density and Shadow Density - This method takes longer to render, about 5 minutes per frame in my tests, but gives a softer, more mist-like result. 3. Combining Particle and Volume renders in comp - Volume rendering alone lacks specular highlights, so it can appear flat or dry. - To restore wetness, render the whitewater both as A) Volume for body/mist, and as B) Particles for specular highlights. - In compositing, layer the speculars from the particle pass over the volume pass. This blended result can closely match the look of the classic Mantra whitewater shader. It would be great if future Houdini releases include a ready-made Whitewater material using MaterialX nodes, that will be fully compatible with Karma XPU. If you’re aware of a better method for rendering whitewater with Karma XPU, or if I missed something, let me know in the comments. . . . #houdini #karma #sidefx #whitewater #sidefxhoudini #fx #fxartist #simualtion #flip #fluids #water #materialx #xpu #rnd #vfx #flipsimulation #tutorial #particles #volume #solaris #lops

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So much needs to happen before you even start shaping a shot. That’s why I’ve been experimenting with tools that make the technical setup a little smoother. As someone who’s used similar tech before (like markerless motion capture), working with Cartwheel has been a really smooth step forward. You upload reference, it gives you spline data for Maya/Unreal/Blender, and from there it’s still completely dependent on your eye and intention. You can also transfer the data to any rig you like using their tools. I tested it with some of my own boxing footage and a clip of my friend Joyce Nguyen (@jvynguyen) dancing. I even took one of the boxing animations Cartwheel generated and brought it into Maya to animate a Camera on top of it. What stood out is that it’s not trying to replace the craft — it just gets motion on screen faster so I can focus on the decisions that actually matter and keep the creative vision consistent. Sharing this because clearing that early setup has made my workflow feel a lot more fluid, and it’s been nice having something that supports the creative part without changing the way I do personal work.

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“If you strip all the genre debate down to what consistently works for indies, survival games keep coming up for a reason. Open-world survival and crafting isn't just popular on Steam right now, it aligns almost perfectly with what small and midsized teams can realistically build and support. Survival games sit in that sweet spot where systems do the heavy lifting. Instead of needing 30 or 40 hours of handcrafted content, they rely on mechanics, progression loops, and player-driven goals.”

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Here is a small example of a new shader that I developed for Unity HDRP. It’s based on VAT 3.0 from SideFX Software Labs, which is highly optimized. It uses UVs for piece ID and pivot. Why did I create a new shader? Because Labs provides a shader only for URP and the SRP, but not for HDRP. This version is built using a custom HLSL node and Unity’s Shader Graph. Unfortunately, I can’t share the shader because it’s studio work, not personal.

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I couldn’t agree more. Before you start cooking, decide what you want to make so you know what ingredients to get.

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Behind Solaris stand The Unsung Hero of USD Rendering, usually when people think of USD rendering, the spotlight usually falls on Karma, Hydra, or Storm. But behind the curtain, there’s a quiet powerhouse doing the heavy lifting: Husk. Husk is Houdini’s command-line USD render delegate, the bridge between your USD scenes and the renderer. OK it’s not flashy but it’s fast, robust, and absolutely essential for automating renders across a pipeline. What Husk Actually Does It reads .usd, .usda, or .usdc files directly. And executes the Hydra render delegate (like Karma, Storm, or others). it handles frame-range rendering, overrides, and AOVs — all headless, no UI. Integrates beautifully with PDG/TOPs, enabling large-scale distributed rendering. You can run it from a terminal as so: husk myscene.usd -f 1 100 -o $HIP/render/beauty.$F4.exr Or wire it into PDG for batch rendering, versioning, and automation. Now why It Matters for Tech Artists USD-Centric Workflows its Husk is your link between Houdini’s stage and production render farms. Pipeline Integration Ideal for render farm hooks, automation scripts, or cloud jobs. Automation & Validation Perfect for procedural validation (auto-render previews, shot tests). Headless Efficiency No GUI, minimal overhead — great for render nodes or CI/CD. A quick Pro Tip you can even switch render delegates via command line: husk -R KarmaXPU myscene.usd This makes Husk a flexible entry point for any Hydra-compliant renderer — including Karma CPU, Karma XPU, and third-party USD renderers. Husk might not get the spotlight like Karma does, but it’s the backbone that makes scalable, procedural, USD-driven rendering actually possible. #Houdini3D #USD #Husk #KarmaXPU #PipelineTD #TechArt #Proceduralism #Automation #RenderFarm #PDG #Hydra #VFX #CGPipeline #OpenToWork

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No pithy hook for this one.  Just a thought about what separates quality from crap.  I think it's best described as "dynamic range". I regularly see vfx artists making demo reels full of bright flashing stroboscopic particle effects, dwarfing the character they are attached to.  Five different variations of the same effect.  But how can you possibly care?  There's no depth or subtlety to it when everything is turned up to 11. It's impossible to scroll through more than a dozen posts without seeing a character juggle some hapless punching bag of an enemy 20 times with exceedingly ridiculous airborne attacks, such that none of them stand out because they are all as over the top as they could be.  Turned up to 11. The lack of dynamic is desensitizing.  If you have no small, how can there ever be big?  If you have no quiet, how can you have loud?  The music industry figured out a long time ago that compressing the shit out of the music and pushing it as close to clipping as the storage medium allowed would make one song louder than the others... Until everyone did that and nobody is louder, just all max volume all the time. It's harder to be subtle.  It takes more effort to be careful.  It can be scary to trust the end user to notice the difference. Really great creatives get this, and embrace it, across all industries.  Quality requires the quiet.  It demands the small.  It should be obvious that without dynamic range, nothing you're making will have impact.  You're just making another forgettable pop song.

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It’s been a while since I posted anything, so here’s a simple tool for overriding rotation on a joint without using KineFX.

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Iterations of up to 10000 (or more if you want your machine to suffer) for super clean, noise free sampling. Precise control over step size, falloff, advection, warp intensity and influence. My Soft Warp Node seems to be fully working now. However no matter what kind of voodoo math magic I am trying to squeeze into the formula, I cannot get it to be "bulletproof" when using too strong values. I am not even sure if I completely understand what is happening. From my understanding, offset pixels start to move faster than their neighbors, which results in some wrapping issues or folding over each other. But anyway, let's hope for the common sense and artistic vision of my future users that also prevents them from using ultra high values on a regular warp because of the same issues. :D Anyone interested in testing this little baby out? I am thinking of creating folds, maybe even terrain generation or in combination with my Height Conform some foil wrapping shenanigans. PS: It's not tileable yet, this will be the last step. #madewithsubstance #substance3d #substancedesigner Adobe Substance 3D

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Very useful Houdini feature that often gets overlooked: Detail attributes can be saved into the info block of .bgeo/.geo cache files. That means you can read those values later without loading the full geometry, using File SOP Info Load or gstat. This is great for storing lightweight metadata directly inside caches, not just geometry. For example, you could write per-frame profiler stats, memory usage, node timings, or custom sim metrics into each cache file, then inspect performance across an entire simulation afterward without loading heavy caches. Very small feature, but extremely useful for debugging, profiling your simulations, and understanding performance over time.

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