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Peter Arcara

@petercubic

Buffalo, NY native. Loves all things spaceflight, F1, and VFX. Training Lead at SideFX.

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19.11.2024
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Latest posts by Peter Arcara @petercubic

Preview
MOPs: Motion Operators for Houdini This course provides an overview of the MOPs workflow and how it integrates with the rest of Houdini, shows concrete examples of how MOPs can be used in both motion graphics and visual effects workflo...

My MOPs course on Houdini.School is now free! If you want a start to finish course on how (almost) everything works, plus the math background, you can watch it all here: www.houdini.school/courses/mops...

29.01.2026 20:41 πŸ‘ 23 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

You should contact support about that, as it's most likely a bug. I believe both are making the exact same USD primitive, but there is probably an error in the one parameter.

28.01.2026 18:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Tonight (1/28/2026 at 6pm EST), with the series ending over the holidays, we're building a #StrangerThings inspired portal. We'll use #Vellum to animate it breaking apart and healing. This will probably be a multiple week project, but we'll see how far we get.

#houdini #vfx

28.01.2026 18:24 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

They should both be exactly the same, and shouldn't matter which you use.

28.01.2026 15:08 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I honestly haven't really gotten into OCIO controls in Karma yet, so I can't really speak to how important it is to get cleaner renders. I might be doing further conceptual courses on Karma in the future, and if so I will definitely be looking into OCIO.

24.01.2026 18:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I would certainly expect Karma's rendering performance to improve over the years. It's only been "production ready" for a couple of years, so there's a lot of ground to make up to some of the more mature render engines.

24.01.2026 18:23 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Sorry for the contrived example. I'm definitely on the more technical/conceptual side of things, and not a highly accomplished artist. The idea with the example was to show the mechanisms that can be used to get better results.

Every renderer definitely has it's strengths and weaknesses.

24.01.2026 18:23 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Unfortunately, I can't really speak to what Pixar is doing with Renderman. I've never used that renderer.

Also, if you're talking about XPU samples, you can't set a minimum value. You can only use the Path Traced Samples and the variance threshold parameter as your sampling control.

24.01.2026 18:21 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Path Traced convergence mode is more efficient in shots where there is a very shallow DoF. It's also the default for XPU.

24.01.2026 18:14 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks so much for the kind words!

21.01.2026 19:49 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
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Houdini Hangout | Home Come join the live education environment for learning SideFX Houdini. The stream is live every Wednesday at 6pm ET. Users of all skill levels are welcome!

Tonight (1/7/2026 at 6pm EST) we're going to get back to streaming after the holidays! To ease back in, we're going to do a Q&A session. We do these from time to time, and they're usually a lot of fun. Bring your thoughts and questions!

houdinihangout.com

#Houdini #vfx

07.01.2026 19:16 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Houdini Hangout | Home Come join the live education environment for learning SideFX Houdini. The stream is live every Wednesday at 6pm ET. Users of all skill levels are welcome!

Tonight (11/26/2025 at 6pm EST), I'm going to try to finish up the laser project that I started last week. This time we'll add some volumetric effects to try to make the scene a lot more dynamic.

houdinihangout.com for stream info

#houdini #vfx #motiondesign #copernicus

26.11.2025 19:43 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Houdini Hangout | Home Come join the live education environment for learning SideFX Houdini. The stream is live every Wednesday at 6pm ET. Users of all skill levels are welcome!

Tonight (11/19/2025 at 6pm EST) I'm going to try to create some lasers using some of the new tools in #Copernicus. Last time I wasn't so successful, but I'm hoping that this time we'll come up with something much better.

info: houdinihangout.com

#houdini #vfx #motiondesign

19.11.2025 19:21 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Tonight (11/12/2025 at 6pm) we're going to try to work with some fluid sims, and make slightly sticky collisions. I've had a couple of questions about this on the Discord, so it would be worth trying out. Hope to see you then!

#houdini #vfx #FLIP #simulation

12.11.2025 19:53 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Tomorrow night (11/05/2025 at 6pm EST), we're going to have Kate Xagoraris as a guest. She's worked on a couple of really interesting HDA toolkits for star catalogs and proteins. It should be a great chat with a lot of science nerdiness!

#houdini #sidefx #vfx #sciviz

04.11.2025 20:33 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Tomorrow (10/29/2025 at 4pm EDT) we're going to have Valentina Malavasi join us. She'll be talking about some of her projects that she's worked on as a student at #BUAS. Her work focuses on bridging #Houdini and #Unreal. Hope to see you there!

#SideFX #gamedev #vfx #procedural

28.10.2025 19:10 πŸ‘ 8 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Tonight (10/22/2025 at 6pm EDT) we'll have another guest on the stream, Ferry Taswin! If you're curious about ways to make your own custom workflows in #Houdini this stream should be really interesting for you. Hope to see you there!

#sidefx #python #vfx

22.10.2025 14:05 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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We’re thrilled to announce that you can now become a Houdini Certified Instructor! Apply to take the Houdini Exam and join our growing community of certified instructors.

More details are available here: www.sidefx.com/education/edu...

#sidefx #houdini #instructors

01.10.2025 20:35 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Houdini Hangout | Home Come join the live education environment for learning SideFX Houdini. The stream is live every Wednesday at 6pm ET. Users of all skill levels are welcome!

Tonight (10/1/2025 at 6pm EDT) we're going to to another live Q&A on the stream. If you have any questions about how to do something in #Houdini this is a great time to ask on the stream. We'll all do our best to get you an answer.

houdinihangout.com for more info

01.10.2025 18:32 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Tomorrow night (9/17/2025 at 5pm EDT), Carlos Dordelly will be joining the stream to talk about some practical workflows and tips in #Solaris. He'll especially focus on things for solo artists and small teams. See you there with your questions!

#sidefx #houdini #vfx #mograph

16.09.2025 21:06 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
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Houdini Hangout | Home Come join the live education environment for learning SideFX Houdini. The stream is live every Wednesday at 6pm ET. Users of all skill levels are welcome!

Tonight (9/10/2025 at 6pm EDT) we're going to try to connect a #Copernicus Flow sim to a #Vellum sim. We'll use the velocity from one to drive the other. Hope to see you there!

For more stream info and Discord link: houdinihangout.com

#sidefx #houdini #motiondesign #vfx

10.09.2025 18:16 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Houdini Hangout | Home Come join the live education environment for learning SideFX Houdini. The stream is live every Wednesday at 6pm ET. Users of all skill levels are welcome!

Tonight (9/3/2025 at 6pm EDT) we're going to try to get something working with the new Shot Builder tools. There won't be anything grand or expansive shown off, but we'll do our best to do something interesting with them.

houdinihangout.com

#houdini21 #sidefx #vfx #openusd

03.09.2025 19:44 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Houdini 21 is released! Tonight (8/27/2025 at 6pm EDT) we're going to open it up and play around with some of the new features. There are lots of features that weren't covered in the Keynote, and we'll try some of those. Bring your questions!

#sidefx #houdini #vfx #motiondesign

27.08.2025 18:41 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Just a reminder that we'll have Danny Laursen as a guest tonight (8/13/2025), but this time starting 2 hours earlier at 4pm EDT. Hope that will be a nice change of pace for any Europeans wanting to watch.

Come join us to talk about Danny's awesome flower workflow and HDAs!

13.08.2025 11:49 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I love that those timecodes are in hh:mm, and not mm:ss. Hahaha! It was quite the marathon of features. :)

13.08.2025 11:46 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
H21 Keynote Vancouver
H21 Keynote Vancouver YouTube video by Houdini

Soo many incredible goodies coming in #Houdini 21!

- Animation, rigging and muscles: 0:10
- Quad-remesher, texture baking and terrain erosion: 1:02
- Rendering: 1:20
- COPs texture gen: 1:40
- Simulations: 2:07
www.youtube.com/watch?v=C--0...

#techart #simulation #procedural #3dart #texture #anim

12.08.2025 20:10 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Watch the Houdini 21 Keynote from SIGGRAPH 2025! Discover new KineFX motion mixer, muscle system improvements, MetaHumans integration, Copernicus GPU Pyro solver, built-in ML tools, Vulkan support, and more. Today at 10 am PST!
youtu.be/C--08SipCNU

12.08.2025 16:29 πŸ‘ 29 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1
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This week (8/13/2025 at 4pm EDT) we'll have Danny Laursen on the stream to talk about his awesome flower tools. We'll look at the logic behind the HDAs, and then go into the tool's functions. Hope to see you there!

www.youtube.com/@Dan...

#sidefx #houdini #3dFlowers #FLOPs

11.08.2025 23:05 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Houdini 21 Sneak Peek
Houdini 21 Sneak Peek The following is a preview of some of the new features coming in Houdini 21! We will reveal more at the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, so keep an eye out for the Keynote, HIVE presentations and more :) starting week of August 11.Β  https://www.sidefx.com/houdini-hive/siggraph-2025/ - - - - -

Tonight (8/06/2025 at 6pm EDT) we're going to chat about the H21 Sneak Peak video that was released on Monday. I'm sure you've seen and heard about it by now, but if you want some more analysis of the video come join us!

youtu.be/aq7JQCV51CY...

#houdini #sidefx #vfx #H21

06.08.2025 13:46 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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EQUINOX | SideFX Join us for Houdini HIVE Equinox in Toronto - a multi-day event where the Houdini Community has access to IGNITE workshops, HIVE presentations, and social events.

We are thrilled to announce #houdini HIVE Equinox (Sept 23–25, 2025), join us for IGNITE workshops, HIVE presentations, and social events. Building on last year’s Horizon, this year goes bigger with more ways to learn, connect, and be inspired.

www.sidefx.com/equinox/

01.08.2025 21:47 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0