cmiVFX class: Houdini Directable Particles & Point Clouds
A 3-hour cmiVFX training I recorded in 2012 on directing particles with point clouds in Houdini. The site is long gone; the demo reel survived.
In 2012 I recorded a training class for cmiVFX: Houdini Directable Particles & Point Clouds. Just over three hours across five chapters, aimed at TDs who wanted particles that go where the shot needs them to go rather than where the sim feels like going. It built up a reusable point cloud advect digital asset, starting from a Mantra shader that writes point clouds out of SOP geometry, through POP VOP advection, then packaging the whole thing as an OTL and handing clean AOVs to comp. The last chapter ran it against FLIP, Pyro and surface flows to show the same trick working in different sims.
cmiVFX itself has since vanished from the internet, so the class is gone with it. The release demo survived on their Vimeo:
The announcement thread on the SideFX forum is still up too, including me defending the “advanced difficulty” warning in the course notes. It was accurate.