Just Drop & Render | Tim van Helsdingen | FMX HIVE 2025
16Ever wished you had more sim or render power at your fingertips? Now you can! When JW from Drop & Render reached out about bringing Houdini to their farm, I was immediately excited. I had tried other cloud solutions before, but they never quite worked the way I wanted. With Drop & Render, our goal was to create a workflow that integrates seamlessly with the way you already work as a Houdini artist—making it feel just as smooth as using local machines. Just use assets from anywhere on your machine, whether it’s a local drive, a network drive—it doesn’t matter. Just submit your job, and it all works automatically.
In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the journey of designing these tools—from the first ideas to the beta release, testing different setups, and finally using them in live productions under real-world pressure (and tight deadlines!). Throughout development, I used the tools extensively, refining them along the way, and today, they are an essential part of my workflow. I’ll showcase several projects I’ve run this way, highlight the challenges we encountered, and explain how we improved the tool to handle any scenario.
It’s been an incredible experience watching this take shape, and I can’t wait for all of you to try it for yourselves!
Tim van Helsdingen is a 3D artist from the Netherlands. For the past decade, he has worked as a freelance artist for a wide range of clients, creating everything from commercials to visuals for music tours. If it’s cool and interesting, he's all in! Alongside his commercial work, he has been making tutorials for just about as long as he has been doing CG. There are now hundreds of hours of educational content out there for you to absorb with your eyeballs and earholes. He loves the balance between creating and teaching—it keeps things fresh. Every new challenge in his client work sparks discoveries that he can later share with others, making sure he never gets bored. That’s also why he is so excited to be involved with the tools for Drop & Render. It’s another perfect fit for what he does, bringing together creativity, problem-solving, and education in a way that keeps pushing things forward.
00:00 Meet Tim and His Work
03:34 Freelancing with Houdini
07:10 Procedural Asset Building
10:46 Working with Clients
14:22 Tool Development Insights
17:58 Managing Projects Solo
21:34 Rendering Best Practices
25:10 Client Feedback and Iteration
28:46 Tim’s Favorite Projects
32:22 Advice for New Artists