Crowds in Houdini 15

Introduction and Project Overview
(instrumental music) Hello, my name is Andreas Glesen and I'm working as a FX Technical Director at RISE Visual Effects Studios. My latest projects include Captain America Two, Iron Man Three, and other feature films. In this course, we are taking a look at the Houdini Crowd Tools, which were introduced with Houdini 14, and enhanced with interesting features like Ragdolls and other improvements in Houdini 15. In their current state, they provide huge possibilities to set up large scale crowd simulations with thousands of agents. We will learn how to prepare our characters for being used in crowd simulations, populate our scenario, and define routes for our agents, like avoiding obstacles or search for cover under heavy fire. Also, we will take a look at the newly introduced (mumbles) effects to add some more interesting dynamics. In the end, we will have a working crowd simulation with hundreds of agents, and we will use Stylesheets to add even more variety at render time. I'm excited to work with you on this fresh and interesting topic, so let's get started with the first lesson. (instrumental music)