Manuel Kotulla works as a freelance Creative Director, Motion Designer, and 3D / VFX Artist in Hamburg. Previously, he spent many years as Creative Director for Animation & VFX at the Serviceplan Group. He has a passion for Houdini, cinematic lighting, and his Fuji camera.
For anyone tired of character setups held together by hope, version notes and one dangerous checkbox, Houdini 21 promises a paradigm shift. By decoupling mesh, rig logic, animation and execution through KineFX and APEX, SideFX is taking another run at the holy grail of procedural rigging. But can it deliver a fast and intuitive workflow?
2 hours and 18 minutes. That is almost exactly the runtime of the first Matrix film, and exactly the duration of the Houdini 22 release keynote. So yes, this promises a rather chunky package of new features and improvements.
Bend It warps 2D in Fusion with bend, taper, twist, and shear plus optional lighting and materials. It needs Fusion 19.1+ and a strong sense of restraint.
Modeler 26 for Houdini introduces a significantly expanded PolyPen, Bezier-based deformation, curve-driven boolean operations, viewport card drawing, and a new object layer system.
InstaMAT merges painting, materials, and mesh editing into one node-based tool that connects Substance-style workflows with procedural control. Sounds great, so we'll get our hands dirty and test it!
Houdini 21 polishes the chaos: production-ready MPM, neural surfacing, smarter Pyro, and Vulkan viewport upgrades: all taste-tested for real-world use. (Part 1 of ???)
Fusion, the compositing tool in and out of Resolve, has got a big update - and we asked BMD's Simon Hall, what it all means and what the future holds..
With its latest release, Blackmagic Fusion is positioning itself more aggressively than ever as a powerful and cost-effective complete package for node-based compositing and motion graphics. We check whether Fusion 20 lives up to the high expectations.