The Snowdrop engine is efficient and flexible, enabling relatively small teams to create ambitious AAA games. At the core of the Snowdrop engine, we want to empower our creators.

This video presentation steps through the process of the procedural building and siege weapon destruction for the Microsoft game: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition, using a tool we created within Houdini FX.Our tool took advantage of Houdini’s ability to create complex simulated effects using constraints on our 3D geometry and parameters isolating various construction materials that make up the look of the model. These materials were flagged to crumble, fracture and collapse at various staggered times and then were rendered out 360 degrees as sprites for each frame of destruction.

Jerome Hereng has been part of the VFX CG industry for about 15 years. His discipline includes areas of advertising, television series work and feature CG movies such as Despicable Me 1 & 2, The Lorax and Minions for Illumination studio. He joined Virtuos – Sparx about 5 years ago in order to build up the VFX department, that originally started with 3 artists and now has more than 45 people across several disciplines including lighting…

Trying to learn Houdini? We upload a new tutorial every week! This week: The anatomy of nurbs curves. There’s a lot of specific terminology we need to unders...