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Houdini Render #9 - ROOKIES

  • Writer: Sammy Lyu
    Sammy Lyu
  • Jun 23
  • 2 min read



23/06/2025


This past week I made my group submission to the rookies in the "film of the year"category. It was a work in progress with many refinements to be made in future iterations. We were unable to complete and original animation and had to use mixamo animations instead for our teaser.


You can check out the submission here: https://www.therookies.co/entries/39421

"Dead drop" short film teaser

Since this is group work and an official submission, the files will be unavailable for now.

At the pre-vis stage, we were able to visualise the timing and beats, seen below:

"Dead drop" short film pre-vis

KEY POINTS FROM THIS PROJECT: TEXTURE ASSIGNMENT & EXPORTS


  • The main struggle we had was creating a workflow to transfer TEXTURES of models between one 3D software package to another. I was unable to get the textures of our models from Blender. I learnt that we had to "bake" the textures into the models, but even then, I had to manually assign the textures in Houdini.


  • I also learnt to ALWAYS UNPACK and CONVERT TO POLYGON all your models before assigning groups and textures, as packed geometry will cause errors when assigning textures and exporting.


  • The format that worked for me when exporting the static (T-pose) models and sharing them on a platform like sketchfab was the GLTF format with everything compiled into a .ZIP - I found that most programs and online repositories can read the files with a lot less trouble than an FBX or an Alembic.


  • When assigning textures, always make use of any EXISTING NAME ATTRIBUTES, alot of the time the models will have already been named according to each mesh by the modeller, things like @name or if using the "agent" SOP the @agentshapename are very useful when assigning textures.


IMPORTING & USING ANIMATION


  • When importing animation, if you are not planning to animate further or use textures, it is best to stick with the ALEMBIC file format as that causes the least amount of headache in FX.


  • Try and utilise the AGENT, MOTION CLIP, AGENT CLIP, AGENT CLIP TRANSITION, AGENT CLIP PROPERTIES combination of nodes when import and blending a handful of animation on a character, it works better than using the AGENT dop with the SEQUENCE BLEND method as it allows more control.


That is the end of the key points summary for this post. Thanks for reading up, see you in the next one!

As always, you can check out my notes here (apologies if it's not up and running yet):


 
 
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