Christopher Rutledge

fun with SIMULATIONS in COPERNICUS with Houdini 21

Hello my lovely friends and happy 2026 to you all. Starting the year off right with a brand new Houdini tutorial showcasing some of the fun I have been having lately with COPERNICUS in Houdini 21, especially since they added new simulation tools :)

I hope you enjoy and apologies for the radio silence for a while. Had a very tough year but things are finally better and I hope to be putting out new tutorials soon. Huge thank you to everyone who has stayed subscribed and supporting ...

Eggland!

Hey everyone, this TV pilot that I was responsible for the animation on just dropped on Adult Swim. I had some help from some other super awesome Houdini friends, Matt Siegel, Bruno Cohen, and TJ Pulliam, who you may see around the discord and elsewhere, plus Brandon Lester who did some awesome one-off FX sequences. It's been a while since we finished it, spending most of 2022 on this project from around April through November.

It was created by Conner O'Malley, Cole Kush, and B...

Vellum Minimal Mode

I wanted to share this underrated feature from the new release that everyone should check out!

Annecy talk is online!

Hey there friends, the Annecy talk I did with Magnus about the film we are making with the rest of the incredible Tumblehead team for SideFX is online now! I go pretty deep into how I built the sweat generator including some tricks using a point deform inside a solver. We also talk about the film and share a sneak peek WIP clip!

The other annecy talks are also worth checking out. Cristin gives really good insight into SideFX's plans with character and animation/rigging. 2024-07-18 21:56:40 +0000 UTC View Post

the state of character rigging with APEX in Houdini 20.5

YO! Houdini 20.5 is out!! What are you doing? Go get it!!!

Lots of fun stuff in Houdini 20.5 and I'm excited to make some more videos about some of my favorite new features. Apex definitely is still a bit rough but I wanted to break down the current state of apex and specifically the autorig components so that you can get started rigging and animating and have some fun if you are daring enough.

I also recommend checking out the sidefx content library for some more ad...

Pictoplasma 2024 Talk

Have been super busy recently working on a short film project with the tumblehead.com gang which you can see an update on from Magnus's FMX talk ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOz5PBDWTjU  ) that he did while I was at Pictoplasma in Berlin doing this fun talk. Now I'm in Denmark working with Tumblehead IRL for the month before we ...

Adding controls to you rig with apex is so easy!

Wish I figured this out yesterday before I made that video. Im sure I'll make a more comprehensive apex rigging video at some point, buit while people are still figuring things out, heres a quick supplementary video to the last one that shows how to set up custom controls in a basic way. nice!

A Super Basic APEX video

Houdini 20 is out! One of the big new foundations SideFX is building that is first seeing light of day in Houdini 20 is APEX. It is still very much early days for APEX, and I wouldn't recommend anyone pass judgement or try to immediately dive deep into it unless you are really daring, but it's good to start to wrap your head around what it is and how it can currently be used, as well as some of the ideas from SideFX on how it will be used going forward. So I tried my best to figure out some b...

live stream today

STREAM LINK! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHM-FJPvVEA

Hey patreon! Working on some really fun stuff for you guys...

While that's rendering though I thought it might be fun to do a little live stream today and just watch/talk about/react to all the sneak peeks.

You may have seen, but the Houdini 20 sneak peek is live! Exciting stuff! 2023-10-21 19:54:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Solaris Quick Tips!!!

Made this little video in response to Paul Esteves' recent youtube video. Hopefully it's helpful!

update! where I have been and what's coming soon...

Houdini Hangout stream!

Check out this stream I did with Peter Arcara, we talked about lots of stuff, including KineFX, Solaris, Karma, broke down my "Bulby" project in depth, and discussed a bit about a new project I did with my studio Grin Machine for Nike. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzohdGEW-aw

Patreon Trailer

Here's the official launch video for the patreon. Thank you so much to anyone who decides to subscribe, I will do my best to make it worth your while. You'll see if you scroll down that I already have a number of posts including a 50 min part 1 of my project breakdown that is teased at the end of this trailer.

Feel free to post any suggestions/requests for the type of content you want to see. I have a bunch of ideas for things I'd like to cover including:

Solaris/Karma/USD (got bi...

Solaris/Karma XPU quick VDB instancing demo

Was helping someone out and figured I'd share this with the patreon! Files attached. :) 

Will officially launch this patreon soon by the way, I've been editing a nice launch video, so if you are a secret early lurker/patreon sub stay tuned for that !

Massive KineFX improvement tip from Oliver Hotz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MpVY1J6_ds

Felt that this needed to be shared more so I figured I'd post about it here. This is saving me massively now and im amazed how long I didn't know it. Getting in the realm of 6x performance improvements in the viewport playback.

GooberTalk Project File

This is JUST the project file for Goober Talk available to 3$ patrons. The 10$ tier includes the zip of the project with textures and external stashes, as well as all original HDAs used (and some more bonus ones). 

Super Efficient Caching Quick Tip!

Here's a nice little quick tip that I use all the time for caching stuff. There's a pointcache prep hda that bundles this functionality up attached. Enjoy this freebie!

Goober Talk Project Breakdown Part 1

I covered for you wonderful day 1 patrons my super weird "Goober Talk" project that I made in Houdini, including the audio which I did in Ableton, all the way through until the solaris / karma rendering and lighting stuff that I plan to cover in a part 2 tutorial.

Here's the project files:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2p8x7fcx5qyi4e/GOOBERTALK_PROJECTFILES.zip?dl...