Knowledge Sharing
I’m a big proponent of sharing knowledge with the larger community. Learn a new tip or trick? Share it. You can find many tutorials, talks and conference recordings I have done over the years. This page contains a highlight with some of those.
Games Internship Programme at SideFX
While at SideFX, I also mentored the games interns (10 to date) in the LA office. During that time I created a strategy that provides interns with both new portfolio material, as well as exposing them to new workflows and technologies. By combining personal projects focused on personal development, together with assigned research projects, all interns have found successful placement at companies they admire.
“Paul is an amazing technical developer. His problem solving skills are great and his constructive feedback help all his peers grow to their full potential. He is a great guide, example and needed technical artist for the industry. Truly a pleasure to work with and a great inspiration in the Houdini community.”
— Ivo van Roij, 2018
SIGGRAPH 2021 - SideFX Labs New and Improved Workflows for Artists
Paul and Mai will be talking about several enhancements that have been made with a focus on improved UX and functionality, as well as some new additions to the toolset.
GDC2020 - WaveFunctionCollapse Supercharged with PDG for Level Generation
The WaveFunctionCollapse algorithm is an amazing piece of tech that can greatly increase your workflow in bitmap generation, level generation and overall content creation. In this talk we will explore how to expand upon this using Houdini's massive toolkit of built-in tools. See how you can use PDG to parallelize content creation and supercharge creative workflows for artists.
Epic Livestream 2020 - MegaJam Judging
It’s time to announce the winners of the 2020 Epic MegaJam! It’s not an easy task to pick the finalists and the special modifier category winners, but decisions have been made, and there’s nothing left but to play the games and celebrate our amazing community.
Learn what makes a good game, and what to look out for during GameJams!
Livestream - Python States 101
This is a casual livestream on building a tool with Python States in Houdini. In this stream I show how to get started with Python states, and do so by building a simplified version of the Pick and Place tool found in SideFXLabs.
GDC2019 - Quixel Rebirth: An in-depth look
On this week's livestream, SideFX's Games Team will show a variety of ways Houdini was used for VFX, mesh processing, terrain, world building, and mega-structure detailing in the realistic cinematic, "Rebirth", created in partnership with Quixel and Unreal Engine for GDC 2019.
GDC2019 - Rapid Level Creation for Unity Mobile
Paul gives a high-level overview of the Houdini tools that have been developed to create a rapid iteration workflow for using sketches, created in a paint application to generate 3D game levels in multiple styles for mobile games. Using this workflow the SideFX Games Team created a mobile game in Unity.LAHUG - Baking Texture & Masking Maps at Lightspeed!
SideFX Game Technical Artist, Paul Ambrosiussen, provides insights into how the Maps Baker replicates the functionality of the bake_texture node using nothing but VEX - all from inside COPs (which will be order of magnitudes faster than the go-to solution!). Waiting for renders massively slows down iteration times, which is one of the primary reasons the tool was built: fast, high-quality map baking.