Sidefx Labs: solving problems, daily
Where did the Labs initiative come from, and why is it important for users?
Discover the Sidefx Labs toolset for Houdini
The Sidefx Labs toolset plays an essential role in artists’ ever increasing task of producing more creative content. Looking beyond just using the tools, what are they, and where do these tools come to life?
Houdini 18 released on 27 November 2019, and with it came Sidefx Labs. The toolset is a collection of over 220+ tools at the time of writing, which can be found as a plugin for the main piece of tech: Houdini. But it is not just that. It is a source-available initiative by a small but critical team inside Sidefx, which aims to create higher-level production-oriented tools, examples and prototypes for users who do not have the time to develop complex pipeline components themselves. These tools get developed outside of the regular Houdini development cycle which targets one or more large releases per year. One of the benefits of this more agile approach is quick prototypes to test workflows, examples for customers and plugin development are possible. It also allows for a more lenient support structure, which is important when development resources are more limited.
Sidefx Labs is an initiative that started in January 2016 under a different name: Game Development Toolset. The name has changed since, but the priorities of the development efforts have not. A game developer called Steven Burrichter joined Sidefx some time before that and recognised a pattern in what game studios had been doing using Houdini. They all built similar types of tools using the building blocks that Houdini provides out of the box. One such example in game pipelines is the need for a tool that can export deforming mesh sequences using a rig, since vertex-based animations are typically not supported in game engines. Building these tools internally costs a lot of time for a game studio, which is something they generally do not have. To help solve that problem and to save time for studios using Houdini for these types of tasks, a Github repository functioning as a gallery was formed, where approximately ten tools that solve common production problems were uploaded. Anyone using Houdini, either as a paying customer or as a hobbyist using the free licence, could download these and install them for reference on similar work. The examples were source-available, meaning once installed you can open them up and either learn from them, modify them, or use them as provided.
Not long after that Luiz Kruel was recruited by then director of the Games segment Judith Crow to continue the
effort Burrichter had started, to grow the business in the games segment of the company. By meeting with games studios around the world regularly, he collected knowledge about how games studios were utilising Houdini, and more importantly, what they would like to see from these specialised games tools. The requests were generally high-level tools and workflows that at the time did not really fit into the development focus of the film and advertising-oriented building blocks that R&D at Sidefx had been working on. Artists have been more than capable of building these themselves, but it did increase both the learning curve and bar of entry in order to use it efficiently for a production.
To keep up with the increasing demand for production-ready game development tools, Mike Lyndon joined the team to focus on the VFX side of things. In 2017 Paul Ambrosiussen joined the ranks to develop various integrations that would appear in the toolset, as well as interfacing with key customers to build up their Houdini-centric pipeline. With this newly gained knowledge and experience from additional developers, a goal was established to continue the efforts Burrichter had started with the Game Development Toolset, and evolve it into an actual toolset to be used by customers around the world.
To prove the continuously developed tools for the Game Development Toolset, the team, now consisting of three technical artists, built several demos to showcase them. One of those projects was a small racing game called Brimstone.
Brimstone was a project created in collaboration with Quixel, showcasing several tools including the very popular Vertexanimationtextures to export Rigid Body Dynamics, Sweep Geometry to create the race track, Texture Sheets for fire and crowds, Decal Projector to add detail to geometry without modelling it, OSM Importer to use real life data to create the buildings and streets seen in the distance, and an early iteration of the high-res pipeline to decimate geometry.
At the end of 2018 another such project was developed with Quixel, which would end up becoming the well-known cinematic ‘Rebirth’ to be released at GDC 2019. This was rendered in Unreal Engine and used various tools developed by the same team to make the product come to life. Examples are the procedural smoke setup Mike Lyndon built to speed up iteration times for creating such content, a new baking solution to transfer data from high-resolution geometry to game-ready geometry by Paul Ambrosiussen, Dirt Skirts to hide intersections between landscape and scenery, Sci-fi panelling features for the main superstructure, and many other small tools that function as glue between art and the game engine. Both projects had something in common with the core motivation of the toolset as a whole: talking to end users, and really trying to understand what problems they need solved. By working together with them and iterating based on continuous feedback, the tools keep proving themselves essential to production pipelines.
Many of the functions found in the toolset are a direct result of requests from the community. One such tool is the Physicspainter, which is based on a video sent to the team by an artist at Naughty Dog. The request was to acquire the ability to
‘draw’ physics objects onto an environment and have them simulate to settle nicely into the environment in a natural manner. The Gaea TOR processor is another such tool that was built in collaboration with Quadspinner, to provide an as smooth as possible experience for users utilising both Gaea and Houdini for building environments. The building generator found in the toolset is also inspired by the fantastic work done by Insomniac Games on the Spider-man videogame. That last one is an example of studios noticing the work being done by others and reaching out to the Labs team to ask how such tools get built. With enough similar requests, this then materialises into tools and features that are distributed through the toolset.
At the end of 2019, the team had an internal debate about the branding of the toolset. Usage had been steadily growing exponentially, and many tools were being used by a wide variety of people in industries beyond just games. The decision was hence made to rebrand the Game Development Toolset to Sidefx Labs to reflect the agile nature of the toolset and make it more accessible to people outside of the game-development realm. This rebrand also came with a tighter connection between Houdini and the toolset. Installing was made a lot easier, the toolset now shipped with Houdini for studios without access to Github, and several proven workflow tools got merged into default nodes provided by the software.
Now with the high demand for more tools by the community, various other departments within Sidefx are starting to contribute to the toolset. The really great thing about Labs is that it is a platform to not only experiment with next-gen workflows, but also as a testing ground to validate ideas before committing a large amount of development time on an unproven technique or algorithm. The collection of tools oriented around real-time workflows will play a big role in the evolution of content creation in the near future. To keep up with these changes a big effort has gone into collecting and analysing data on how the tools get used, allowing for efficient and strategic decisions to be made regarding what to focus development on.
“THE CORE MOTIVATION WAS TALKING TO END USERS AND REALLY TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT PROBLEMS THEY NEED SOLVED”