Last day for Motion Graphics in Houdini The workshop is built around creating and directing complete product commercials directly in Houdini. From the initial idea all the way through animation, procedural effects, lookdev, lighting, rendering, and compositing. Launch pricing ends tomorrow!

One of my favorite things to do in Houdini is finding non-simulation ways to create FX. It's amazing just how far you can push a setup by just manipulating attributes. Simulations are useful however when you need to create organic, natural movement. Something like smoke, liquid, where the calculations are dependent on the previous frame existing. But for motion graphics specifically, we often just need an object (or multiple objects) to move from point A to point B. This can be done in many different ways directly through attributes. The key is to add variations: Whether it's by offseting time, scale, positioning, etc. variation is what's going to make an animation satisfying to watch. Sale ends soon! 30% off Motion Graphics in Houdini

I absolutely love tornado setups in Houdini. In fact, it's one of the first setups I learned all these years ago when I first got my hands on Houdini. Something about swirly pyro simulations is just inherently cool. Even cooler is using it to drive the growth of an SDF volume. If you play around with the setup you can come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. Simple things like adding noise on top of the initial velocity can create some fun experiments. This was one of my favorite FX to create for the latest Motion Graphics in Houdini workshop. Hope you guys enjoy it!

Procedural texturing becomes especially powerful when you stop thinking about a texture as a single image and start treating it as a collection of layers. A simple noise pattern can become the starting point for something much more complex. By combining different frequencies, masks, remapping, distortions, and blending operations, you can build surface detail that feels designed rather than random. This is particularly useful for motion graphics, where the same material may need to work across different objects, camera angles, or shots. Procedural textures give you a system you can continuously art-direct instead of a finished image you have to work around. And the best part is that you don't need a separate texturing application to do it. COPs in Houdini can be used to build the entire texture directly inside the same procedural workflow. This is one of the workflows explored in Motion Graphics in Houdini.

Really excited to finally release this workshop after many months of work. Enrollments start next week!

One of the modules in Motion Graphics in Houdini is entirely focused on curves. In this project, we’ll build a complete T-shirt reveal commercial from scratch, using curves to drive a wide range of procedural effects and animation. Curves are an essential part of motion graphics, so we'll explore different ways to manipulate and animate them: making them grow, adding randomness and curliness, clumping and splitting them, growing geometry along them, creating groups, and using attributes to control how everything behaves. Most of these effects are driven procedurally, directly at the geometry level, without relying on simulations. This is also where attributes become especially important. By learning how to create and manipulate attributes, you'll gain much more control over how your curves grow, move, deform, and interact. By the end of the module, you'll have a set of curve-based workflows and attribute techniques that you can adapt and build upon in your own projects. Coming August 26.