Self teaching into a TD job (hopefully)

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So as mentioned in my prior post, this blog exists primarily as a place to help catalogue and talk through all things I am attempting to teach myself.
And the major thing I am trying to teach myself is VFX technical stuff, as I am trying to work my way up into a TD job at the visual effects company I work at on my university holidays.

I am currently a render wrangler/frontline support worker at Rising Sun Pictures, and as much as I love my job I would love to move up in to a position where I get to create things and solve problems.

I am a computer science student at university, so I will undoubtedly post about the things I learn there but my primary goal is to teach myself the technical side of Houdini. Which means I will need to buff up on my python and hscript knowledge. As well as learn the inner and outer workings of Houdini. There is other software I will need/want to learn for the role but I have decided to start here, since it plays such a big role in the place I work.

I have devised a list of things that I want to get my head around before the end of this year that will hopefully help get me into a TA/TD position when I return here after the uni year. I will post there things below, I am positive that these things will change as I go. I'll undoubtedly get distracted or decide that some things just aren't necessary/important and end up adding different things instead.
But as it stands, here is a list of some of the things I want to learn:

  • SOPs
  • Packed primitives and polygon soups
  • Get comfortable using attributes
  • hscript
  • Attribute VOP family of SOPs
  • Using iterative approaches in order to procedurally build or modify geometry.
  • FLIP fluids
  • Voxel-based simulations (smoke/pyro)
  • bullet for rigid-bodies
  • DOPs-POPs
  • Wire and cloth
  • SOP-Solver

The ways I am looking at learning right now is predominantly through the
Sidefx tutorials page, and also another site I found call Houdini Tricks.
These are just the major ones I have found so far, I will end up perusing youTube tutorials such as the VFX Pipeline channel.

I will continue to post of any more interesting resources I find.
The real trick will be finding stuff that is up to date and relevant.

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