dot com :)
<aside> đź‘‹ Welcome! My name is Christopher Rutledge, I am a CG Artist, animator, and freelancer. I have been using Houdini since 2017 and it has become my tool of choice for most things 3D. Many people ask me how I learned Houdini, so I made this handy resource for newbies. I also love teaching and have started making my own free tutorials on YouTube, as well as premium ones on patreon and gumroad.
Feel free to DM me on slack, instagram, twitter, or try shooting me an email if you have any questions! Also join the DISCORD !
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For more context, I made this resource originally years ago and I update it when I can, but you will see as a result, some of the tutorials are fairly old. I think there are a lot of old Houdini tutorials that are still very useful, 98% of the content is relevant still today, so I like to leave them up, but there are also some big things that change or new things that get added which is important to be aware of. For example, OBJ level rigging is basically replaced by KineFX, and Mantra / OBJ level lighting and rendering is bascially being replaced by Karma / Solaris. However, because these things are still so new, there is not as much content out there on it as you might hope, and you may accidentally find a lighting tutorial for mantra or a rigging tutorial for obj if you just search “houdini lighting” or “houdini rigging.” This will change with time but something to be aware of!
If you ever get stuck following along with an old tutorial, I would always emplore you to ask on discord if you can’t figure it out yourself. So much of learning Houdini or any new software is asking questions and talking to people about what the best practices are and trying to learn how others solve problems so you can gain your own intuition for how to figure things out on your own.
For inspiration and or learning there are some talks and a lot of other great things on the Houdini youtube page. I recently did a talk myself for SideFX at the Annecy Animation Festival which can be viewed here. I also recently created a comprehensive character course for SideFX that is FREE on their website and youtube page.