And so the first tool that our VFX artist uses is called Houdini.

Houdini is kind of like an all-in-one 3D software, but it's like most well-known for its simulations.

So think about like destruction or fire or fluids and physics, et cetera.

It is a node-driven and parametric software, so you can basically connect nodes so they can create behaviors that you want.

You can tweak them with parameters as you go.

And so our VFX artist uses Houdini to create dynamic simulations, which you can then convert into frames of animation.

And then he can take those frames, convert them into like a flipbook kind of thing, and then use those as images on particles in the game, animated images, essentially.

Our tech artist also uses Houdini.

However, he uses it in a much different way than what you would sort of expect.

Most of his work is actually done on the command line, so he doesn't really open up Houdini.

He just uses, he just executes the tools that Houdini has

from command line using other scripts and whatever right i don't know it's some crazy so he uses houdini and the scripting languages that it supports python uh h script and vex and he basically uses houdini as a tool to batch process geometry and what this sort of means is for example it's like mass applying data to leaves on trees for example that indicate how they should behave in the wind shader so how they should sway in the wind

This could be for generating meshes, or another use is converting raw animation data into vertex animation data.

This is for optimization purposes so that we can hopefully get better optimizations in the distance without any sort of extra overhead.

I'm not gonna pretend to understand all this stuff 100%.

It vaguely makes sense to me, but I don't feel super comfortable explaining it all.

Anyway, he does a lot of crazy stuff with Houdini.

He just does a lot of crazy stuff in general, quite frankly.

TechArt is voodoo.