Houdini Engine + Play Mode

I've been messing with the Houdini Engine API to see if I can get Engine assets to cook in Unity during play mode.

It does work, as long as I don't ask it to update more than once every few seconds. Otherwise I end up with a memory allocation error:

I'll have to find a good workaround for this.

SIGGRAPH 2013

I went to SIGGRAPH about a month ago with SideFX, where I spent the majority of my time running the Houdini Engine demo at SideFX's expo booth. I really enjoyed getting to know SideFX's Toronto staff, and talking to people interested in the Engine.

I had the privilege of speaking at the "SIGGRAPH Birds of a Feather: VFX Student & Intern Showcase," where I talked about my path from student to professional and showed off some of my internship work. It was a great experience!

Aside from that, I spent a lot of time walking around the Emerging Technologies hall. E-Tech always has a lot of neat technology, and this year was no exception. Some of the ones I thought were especially interesting:

• Incendiary Reflection
• Aireal by Disney Research
• Transwall
• AquaTop Display

I had a blast at the conference, met some amazing people, and caught up with a lot of old friends, including my mentor from Georgia Tech, Greg Turk. Hopefully I'll get to go again next year in Vancouver!

Messing around with audio...

I've been getting back into computer audio recently. I really enjoyed the course when I took it at Georgia Tech four years ago, during which my teammates and I wrote a basic autotuner (back when autotuning was still cool). More recently, I've been brushing up on comp. audio concepts (yay, wikipedia!) and playing around with scripting an audio spectrum analyzer in Unity: https://vimeo.com/71708392.

I've also done some more work on my Kinect pointcloud visualization in Houdini: https://vimeo.com/71702497. This one's an audio-driven CHOPs animation of a Kinect pointcloud. The particles change color according to the pitch and percussion. R value for percussion, and G & B according to pitch. It's not perfect, and it's still a work in progress, but it's getting there.