How to Learn Houdini from Scratch in 13 Weeks | Matt Brunner | Digipen
254From Houdini Hive Education Edition originally broadcast on November 12, 2020.
How do you introduce a production software package as massive and interesting as Houdini to new students? This talk is about the dilemmas I’ve faced answering that question and some of the solutions and results that I have come up with.
Matt Brunner currently works as a professor in the department of Animation and Production at DigiPen Institute of Technology outside of Seattle. He teaches courses in Houdini and game production. A lot of history preceded DigiPen. He started out as an artist, painting in a studio in Texas. He took a job as an art director for an educational video production unit after living poor for far too long and quickly immersed myself into digital animation during its formative years. This led him to get a Master’s degree in Visualization from the Viz Lab at Texas A&M focusing on digital animation and cinema. He took that experience and started the computer animation department at what was then the largest stop motion animation company in the world, Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon. He built the capacity for computer animation and vfx at Vinton’s (now called Laika) for almost a decade before becoming interested in the new game console that was soon to be released, the Xbox. He took a blind leap into a job as an experience director and cinematics director at Microsoft Game Studios and worked on a number of games, notably Crimson Skies. Eventually he left to form Airtight Games, a game dev company with some of his co-workers, and they created a number of new IP titles including Dark Void and Murdered: Soul Suspect.