The power of Houdini

Hi all,

As in the past post I've been super busy which I guess can only be a good thing, currently doing three jobs - part time lecturer at the University of Teesside teaching Games Art, mostly 3dsMax and UDK. Secondly doing a range of online tutorials for games-dev.com - UDK materials and the power of the editor. Lastly modelling game assets for a company based out of Dallas.

So with all that not had as much time as I would have liked to continue practicing Houdini, I'm still sure that it is one of the more powerful 3d tools on the market and I'm sure as games continue to be made in shorter amounts of time for less money companies will look to using the power of the procedural pipeline. I'd love to get to the point where I can help teacher the students to use it to improve they workflow that would be great. With the summer break soon coming up - I plan to do more please stay tuned and I hope to do more updates soon.  

Starting Work - But still learning

Hi, I've had a really busy for weeks - firstly with Animex at the University of Teesside, it was an awesome week met and spoke with so many great people from across all areas of the games, animation and films industry including the art director from Epic games, the lead VFX supervisor from DNeg who told me to continue learning Houdini as it gets used so heavily at that company.

It will be a week I'll always remember.

I've still been playing around with Houdini but haven't had the time to put anything new here. I'll try to get something done this week.

Updating Portfolio

Hi everyone, had a busy couple of weeks trying to update the look of my portfolio.

I've still been busy working away with Houdini found some amazing work done using Houdini as the procedural work flow tool to build levels for the Unreal Engine, this is as I see it one of the ways in which companies in the games industry will need to improve and take on-board if they wish to continue making great games and keeping the product times low.

View my portfolio at

http://www.jameswhatling.me.uk

Job Interview the Outcome

Well sadly I didn't get that job, but onwards to the next interview and loads more applications to fill out. I do have a short piece of work in the pipeline which hopefully will be a great for networking.

Or a second note I have started making plans to make my presence more widely known and maybe set things rolling for work in the future freelancing or contracting. I have started to streamline my vimeo and youtube account ready and brought the domains to VFXEdge .com and co.uk I will slowly start working to build a rep in the www.

I'll keep you informed us it  moves forward.

Counting Frame

Counting Frame tutorial completed, very simple modelling but with some great controls to allow easy altering. Should be able to use much of the process for future projects.

See this to follow along yourself Adrian Lazar's Counting Frame

http://vimeo.com/36617637

Job Interview

Hello everyone,

Had a busy week had a job interview yesterday so been busy this week getting ready for it, feel bad for not updating sooner but I should be able to get something done today.

So I should be doing a second post today .................

Rendering Takes It's Toll

Just a quick update my graphics card sadly died, so I had to upgrade (Always nice) but only to find that my monitors are too old with only a VGA input and the new graphics card a GeForce 650 2GB only has one VGA output, so I've lost a monitor for a short time til I can replace it.

Trying to render work has therefore not happened for a few days. I hope to render some images for either the Procedural Lightning Field which I have finished, or a WIP for the Volcano tutorial.

Looking forward to seeing what difference the new card will make to the render times.