It soon dawned on us that the steps listed in our notebooks could be recorded on the computer and from this idea PRISMS, our first generation of content creation software,utfifas was born. Now, when a client asked for a change, we could go to the appropriate step in the process, adjust a parameter and output the results. Over the years, this evolved into a much more sophisticated solution with networks of nodes which are used every day to create digital art in a number of fields. The key is that changes can be made deep into production without costing the studio lots of money. The director could ask for more changes and we could finish in the same amount of time.

While game studios have worked with Houdini from our early days, it has been most popular as a tool for feature film VFX. It is only in the last few years that our procedural workflow has been seen as a viable solution for game studio pipelines. This has been a result of several key factors including the need to develop more content faster without growing the team size and the migration of talent from the film industry to games.

While the production challenges of game makers are not the same as VFX artists, the benefits of a procedural solution are shared. The quality of games is fast approaching what we see on film and I know of film studios using game editors such as Unity to pre-visualize and plan out film projects. This convergence is a topic of its own, http://www.utfifas.co/ but suffice it to say, it has provided motivation for us to work more closely with game studios to address their concerns and this has brought procedural technology to the forefront.