Jordan Halsey

Jordan has had a long career in special effects and media. During that career he's always been on the leading edge of technologies. If there's something new that's coming out, Jordan no doubt has his hands on it and is among the first to be doing so. Jordan has also had some some very noteworthy projects supporting the likes of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Walt Disney. So not only is he familiar with leading edge technologies but he's applying that for you know really profound purposes Jordan is has a very interesting story to tell about how he has migrated from various technologies and so we're going to be talking about that today which so let's get started let me let me welcome Jordan thanks for for meeting us today really appreciate your you're taking time to speak with us Jordan and maybe you want to say a few words about yourself just to just to get started to equate the audience yeah sure hi my name is Jordan Halsey  and I have been like working with 3d roughly since 1992 when I kind of like first discovered it in architecture school I'd already been working on computers a lot doing graphics on a on a old apple and an early generation mac and then at sciarc we had a computer lab and I discovered 3d for the first time and just kind of continued to work with that throughout my life and have done it in various different forms usually starting mostly with architecture kind of moving to architectural visualization and then to live entertainment where I worked in the world of live entertainment as far as design and visualization  meaning live stage shows working with a production designer named Bruce Rogers and then in like 2001 2000 roughly is when I started transitioning into what was like the emerging market of motion graphics that hadn't really been much of a discipline until then  I we I mean we've done some early stuff in the late 90s with after effects when it was koza after effects then  adobe bought it and then  but that kind of world really came together I think in the two early late 90s early 2000s when individual artists started to be able to kind of produce works on mass and so since then I've been involved with various different forms of  3d rendering involving different fields mostly I would say in the world of a lot of high res rendering for visuals for led displays for live performance such as Michael Jackson as he working on that as well as various projection mapping shows and then  roughly since 2005 has been 2015 has been really mostly concentrated on real-time development  VR virtual reality augmented reality and  was a technical director for a virtual reality company  and now I'm currently a teacher professor at USC in the cinema school and  we also I'm a technical director for a lab well I can't say the name of the lab yet but it's a lab that's focused on virtual and augmented reality the announcement I think is like in a week of what the actual name will be but it's we're focused on  virtual reality augmented reality real-time technologies real-time volumetric rendering I'm very interested in volumetric rendering  point clouds and data reconstruction and stuff like that so so all the latest and greatest Jordan yeah can you hear me Jordan oh yeah for sure yeah no no yeah definitely oh I didn't I didn't yeah that was a question yeah yeah yeah I guess I mean I'm always I'm very interested in forward technology so I'm very interested in  you know working  I'd always been actually very interested in photogrammetry and match moving and kind of photo modeling from the early days when you kind of had to do it yourself  and then  and then working with starting then in like 2005 like working with a very early version of nuke and being able to kind of like build out these  reconstructed Panavision kind of pano camera moves that you could do with 3d compositing that you couldn't really do and shake at that time you know and because nuke just had such a better 3d space and then that moving into like what is now kind of like contemporary photogrammetry with like reality capture or metastate meta shape but I'm very interested in the real time application of that and creating point clouds with things like real-time lidar like ouster and you know you can use various there's various real sense cameras depth sensing cameras like stereo labs yeah stuff like this so Jordan I think one of the things our audience probably would be interested to hear when when they're faced with a project they might be aware that there is  a technology that is new and emerging and could potentially help them in their project but to go down that path would be potentially a great risk right because there's always a project deadline and when you step into a technological area for which maybe there's little experience either your own or or the industries you know that's a that's a big gamble and I think your career seems to be consistently taking those gambles so I'm curious  as I said I think our audience would be as well like that why are you such a risk taker what's the what's the risk reward that you you balance and and how do you manage to employ those new technologies on a project  given that you know there there no doubt are deadlines that are imposed upon you and you're feeling all this pressure to get things done  so how does that work well  yeah it could be very stressful I'll be honest  you know there's been times where you know  I can kind of like think of I mean the the lidar the light field job this was a very stressful job because this had never been done at all in the sense of no one had ever really shot with this camera with this large of a light-filled volume and integrated cg in the kind of way that we were and there were so many different technical  limitations that we had to deal with and it kind of you know brought together this encompassing field of a a lot of different things but like in this example  you know when I met with them  it became kind of clear to me that you know really what we had to be concerned with was like depth information depth processing disparity information they were kind of like these traditional 2d to 3d workflows that had been around for a while already and I've always been interested in depth maps and kind of like reconstruction and things like deep where you can do renderings and kind of reconstruct that 3d information as point clouds and nuke and so it kind of seemed like it was logical that hey like you know I mean we had very we were like hey this is what it is correct you know and they would be like yes this is what it is and then  then it comes down to actual you know production time and you've got to kind of like figure out  also that that somehow it seems to be that these also get tied with very  quickly moving timeline so you have to really hit it running a lot of times because  they're potentially don't have these great giant budgets because of this kind of like new technology that they're trying to push and push the boundaries of it but usually I try to see a path that's forward  before I would agree to it  and you know  I think that there's a a lot of things you know that like for instance coming from VR in the late 90s as an example one of the things I used to do is I worked with this company called or virtual and we were making CD-ROM games sometimes among some of the things we did we were using macromedia director and at this time we were using qtvr so we were already doing these panoramic renders in the late 90s and kind of making these video games or the transition between them so I've been very familiar with that kind of panoramic space for a long time and then that kind of transferred into new when you could build out these kind of things and kind of photo model and reproject pretty easily so it's kind of I wouldn't I would say I tried to calculate a risk but it can be very stressful you know  for sure so it seems some of the some of the key prerequisites  if I am observing some patterns correctly with you I mean you had you had some foundational knowledge before you actually took that technological risk and that was an important prerequisite it seems probably I'm guessing also that  maybe there were some projects that were low risk that you could take some chances on that you did your initial experiments on  is is that is that kind of typical of maybe how you approach this or did you just jump right in into a project and go for it no no I definitely but I think that I mean that's one of the  you know for me personally like what I love is tinkering and looking at things and trying to break things apart and figure out how things are done  so I'm kind of always doing that anyways you know like I mean you know and and right I'm especially lucky right now because of working at USC and having been there for three years and kind of like having developed a little bit of network it allows me to interact with other people and and kind of like  kind of go down paths that I might not have been exposed to normally so like right now I'm working on a project that involves  robotics and photogrammetry and in programming automation stuff like that and so you know like like I have some minimal but some robotic experience I understand photogrammetry  and I can kind of bring those things together but it's the constant playing around I love playing around with stuff  in in today's day of super specialization you know being being knowledgeable of all these different areas is is really difficult to do right you don't you're up professionally you're often pigeonholed into a particular area right so so it sounds like you you know you not forced this upon yourself you did it because you loved doing it you loved tinkering but you know the fact that you had these  practical experiences in a variety of different technological areas was was also key to your success would you say yeah for sure for sure I think that I think that that's you know like I mean it's it's kind of like six of one happened I mean they both have their benefits and drawbacks right I don't like like sometimes people like look at me and they don't quite understand how I fit into it maybe like a more traditional pipeline right and then sometimes you have companies that are more  more kind of not bound to traditional  pipelines and technologies or you have places like Disney imagineering where they're constantly doing things like that you know and so I think that I really never wanted to work in a traditional pipeline a traditional effects pipeline that wasn't really my thing I didn't want to like be working in that kind of so I've always tried to take jobs where I'm kind of maybe in control of the whole thing as much as I possibly can be that that's not always the case  or that it is kind of  furthering myself I try not to take jobs that are  like you know pushing me backwards I guess right and I'm currently very lucky because of my job at USC that I can really focus when I do do outside work or consulting I can really focus on the things that I only want to focus on and I can spend the rest of my time doing a lot of research which is what I've been doing primarily  so yeah okay so maybe you touch on something interesting folks who are watching this may be interested in getting in touch with you to add them to to their team to help out on some various challenges you you would be available to do that sort of thing yeah yeah I am I'm I mean I'm saying yeah I am for sure I'm pretty like booked solid yes at the moment and and and I and I'm very careful about the jobs that I would take you know so I am very I'm very lucky like that I can be careful about the jobs I'm taking but I'm currently yeah we're we're right now we're doing like the robotic photogrammetry  thing and we're working on a projection mapping in a  something in Shenzhen, China which is quite cool it's going to be we're going to like map a giant grain silo on the outside and a grain silo on the inside which presents some interesting issues because it's a cylindrical  completely cylinder it's like about 24 meters by 12 meters tube and so it presents a lot of interesting challenges exactly so speaking of some interesting projects you've been on we introduced you and that you were involved in doing some work with Madonna and Michael Jackson and Disney maybe can you can you kind of tell us a bit about those projects sure sure I mean actually the Madonna the Madonna video was really like my first real believe it or not it was like my first first I guess animation well I guess not that's hard to explain so in in from 1997 to 2001 I worked with Bruce Rogers of tribe design  he's a production designer  and working on live shows like I said so these were mostly Bruce with design stage shows  and but we would these would be big stage shows we worked on at the time like it was Ricky Martin and Mariah Carey a bunch of different large acts like that and he he now does all the super bowl shows and so in 2001 he got  Madonna's contract to do her stage show and they needed some  they had some visuals that were being done for their background and then it turned out that she wanted to make a video that was kind of like  a mix video for a remix song that she did and they wanted to take various videos and then put them into these cg environments and so I so Bruce actually got me this job and  and we worked with I put together a small team of people it was one of the roughest jobs I've ever had in my entire life oh one because we didn't really know what you're doing two two  the deadline was super duper tight and it was under you know it was it there was so many different kind of complications regarding it was my first job as a as a kind of like as a young adult working and so I didn't know how to manage anything at all and  you know it was but amazing you know it was things were so different back then we were so we were doing it we did all in Maya  and you know we were just rendering with the Maya renderer at this time this is this is before your your transition to Houdini right yeah this is 2001 right and and so  yeah so we run it all with the Maya software renderer and rendered in different passes so that we could give it all to like a flame artist but we had a lot of rendering to do and when we finally figured that out we ended up getting a render farm at the time that came from this place called kaiser wozak that's not even around anymore and like they brought it down literally on a dolly 64 machines they were like 1u units at the time and we got it up in rendering at the time and I remember you know once we plugged everything in and we were rendering about 10 minutes just shut the power off on the whole whole place at like two in the morning and so it was a huge learning experience for me on a variety of ways and on a project that for which there wasn't much pressure just it was just Madonna it was an enormous amount of pressure oh my god I deal with pressure pretty well I can't barely apparently yeah I somehow I think you seem to actually thrive on it I you know I yeah right I you know this you know what I tend to kind of like bottle it all up and deal with it and kind of grin and bear it and move through it I've been on some very I mean it that's you know when you're in in the VR company that I was the technical director of you know we would like the lidar job I mean we said yes to that job that was probably crazy you know the amount of  rendering that we had to do I mean you think you it's about a minute of cg times 310 because there's 310 cameras and so the pressure was just I mean it was it was probably the it was just overwhelming you know and and but yet you just kind of suck it up know that it's gonna work out somehow and if you hit a bottleneck you figure out hopefully you get through it I it was a rough job too I've never had a job fail which I think that that's you know I mean maybe I have I'd have to think about it but like you know I'm not in a very very very very long time  so I'm pretty good at calculated risk but it can be very stressful my wife gets you know sick of me what are you doing Jordan yeah yeah yeah yeah and then in the end of it I'm like exhausted you know so but in a satisfying way I would imagine yeah sometimes yeah usually usually usually usually  I haven't been in that that situation in quite a while I've been trying to be a little bit more tempered about you know and luckily I can do my research under the guise of USC and not a not a on a client's dollar a lot of the time so but I think I think the moral of the story is sometimes you got to take risks right  they and you use the word calculated risks and if you want to really achieve some new artistic heights it's going to happen by stepping out of your comfort zone right absolutely absolutely   I mean this is I don't know I mean my upbringing probably made that more my mode of modus operandi it's not always beneficial but it can be in certain situations  but I definitely believe you should take risks you know artists should always take risks right and and you should also always do what you want to be doing and and as much as you can be I mean obviously you have to you have to always have there's always somebody about this is one thing that I've always worked them out too there's always somebody above you telling you even when you have your own company and your own clients and you're working on your own projects or you have a research department or you're researching this or there's always someone there there's a wall that you've got to hit you know and so you know I believe that like as much as you can being you know responsible for your own work ethic and making sure that you work as hard as you can for what you're working for no matter what the project is is kind of how I always try to like focus on things too I took a job like last in November that was a commercial that was not it was a really terrible budget for the most part but it presented some interesting  things actually we rendered some of it on your farm as well by the way  it was the thing that was interesting to me about it was that  they wanted to basically reconstruct a bunch of  a construction site downtown one of the buildings here building like a huge one of the high rises so it's quite interesting just to get the access in Los Angeles yeah yeah downtown on figueroa they're building one of the buildings and this guy was putting together a commercial we got access to it but the idea was to rebuild the whole place  with photogrammetry and to be able to match move it in and a friend of mine  David Sudd who's an amazing match mover and photogrammetry artist and a person that I work with my xiaoyu who's kind of my partner went and you know so we basically like you shoot with like a distro you record all the points build all the photogrammetry you get a accurate representation and then you can use like 3d equalizer and match move it in and then we built these reconstructed point cloud worlds for this commercial and it was quite beautiful  and it was it was a very very low budget you know but it allowed us to you know kind of explore this method of working that we've been working on for a while made us some pretty pictures  and to me that's much more interesting sometimes in having a well-paid job right so so that's a seems like that's an example of where you're tinkering  actually found some commercial value and if you have a client's dollar yeah exactly and if you hadn't been doing the tinkering if you hadn't had that that inquisitive nature  you know that that opportunity would probably never have come your way right a hundred percent I mean and you know we were the same you know another example was some of the workflows that we've developed right now that we're working on a lot that  we're putting together  especially now with the world of virtual production this was kind of like before  virtual production was a thing but like in 2018 I worked on a movie that shot all in Croatia and I worked with again with David Sudd and the idea was that we just you know reconstructed everything catalogued all the sets and  and then the idea for us was that you know with rebuilding the photogrammetry correctly so that is correct scale and orientation 100 we can then undistort the camera lens match move that stuff in and we could have multiple cameras match moved into one 3d scene and then we could do like real-time work and  we did we did real-time work and we were using touch designer for this which is a real-time application that's a lot like Houdini it's written by the same person who wrote Houdini and  and so it allows us to just quickly make changes render it in real time kind of like unreal but a little bit different and but we could also work that directly into like an unreal rendering pipeline which is something that we're doing a lot of these days okay Jordan let's shift gears a little bit because  I know you mentioned you started out in Maya I know you are deep into Houdini today I know there's a lot of people who are in that same place right now they're you know they're they're Maya users or or some other 3d solution they perhaps might be looking to move to a more powerful package and solution like Houdini  you've been down that road you've you've faced that mountain  you know you had at some point you had to make a decision to shift your your technical go go-to platform from Maya to Houdini so I'm curious you know what were the circumstances that even made you entertain that choice and then what was the you know what was it like what and what did you do to actually make that transition I think I think lots of people will be interested to know yeah you know it's interesting so I mean I teach Houdini and I teach Houdini in the film school where a lot of people are in Maya and  and and and this is at USC right absolutely absolutely there aren't many schools that teach Houdini are there  I think s-cad teaches Houdini  and I think that it's you know I think that that's actually changing a lot because of you know like a lot of the games departments now are focusing a lot on Houdini because it's just really becoming dominant in the Houdini  Houdini the who do you need unreal and unity pipeline is so amazing that so many world-building and  things like this are doing this so I think it's more and more but yes it's not like as I mean it's not taught like Maya is taught but Maya you know I have I'm not gonna this is definitely not gonna be an endorsement of Maya so any mile lovers out there I'm apologizing in advance  you know the problem you know I love Maya I actually I never had any idea that I would actually be switching to tell you the truth when I switched   I came from a much harder pipeline and that I was using previously and I started working with Maya 1.5  I still use my I mean very not really just to keep up with it but you know I thought it was amazing I really did I that you know the history and being able to go back and kind of edit things and I love the hypershade  and  and then in 2005 I was  given like a one week training course in Houdini a digital domain and I just got in I had no idea what I was going to be doing in all honesty I'd heard about Houdini  and I knew that it was kind of like oh wow you know whatever and so I was like I went did it and truthfully I it was it was a rough week there's no doubt about it  but the one thing that became really super clear to me was that it was it was actually absolutely amazing and that it was  all the things kind of that Maya wasn't right and  at that time learning Houdini was also it was exceptionally difficult right it was the software is extremely expensive they didn't have a Houdini indie  like they do now  they didn't even have the free version yet actually either Houdini apprentice when you say it was difficult to learn I assume that's because of the lack of and learning materials and access to the software there was really almost zero tutorials and and you know access to the software and so what I did honestly I called side effects in Santa Monica and I was lucky enough that  the woman who's no longer there elisa just I went down and I met her and I talked with her and she was like just come here and learn Houdini we'll give you access to so hold on Jordan hold on so you had one week and it seems like you you were hooked I mean you're to put this into perspective you were you were a very solid Maya user prior to that week yeah and you had this week of training which was which was hell and then suddenly you you completely decide to to you know transition so you know why yeah it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't that it was hell it was that it was like introduced all these concepts that had been kind of that Maya like hides from you behind the  behind the scenes you know and like you know so one of the things that I always kind of like show people when we talk about the relationship between like what's the difference between Maya and what's the difference you know when you're using Maya you don't really have to know like what a float is what's really composing a vector when we're moving something and transforming it in three-dimensional space what does that mean when we when we center our pivot what does that mean you know and and and and you know what are the core components it like make up 3d and Houdini like you have to know a little bit more about that kind of stuff so at first it can be a little bit intimidating but the reality is this just opens up a whole world to you and and that it gave me some semblance of that I think when I first had it I saw the power of it is that is that what what drew you in that that that opportunity that potential two two two two two things drew me in to Houdini was  just the procedural nature of it and how it differed from Maya's history and what it was really was  proceduralism and then in all honesty at that time the copy node you know Maya's cop you know we use Maya's copy note a lot like in what Adam we were talking earlier and he mentioned one thing that you know I mentioned one thing that I always say to Maya people which is if you had to have a scene with 310 cameras and one scene in Maya how would you do that and people did just kind of like roll their eyes and say I don't know and and then we also with Adam earlier and he was saying well let's make a box let's duplicate it let's make an array of boxes so you you know duplicate special this way duplicate special this way and you've got a grid by grid of 100 now let's change that and and then let's start putting things you know you know instead of a box matrix let's make it random and have a sphere and a box and a triangle and let's put something directly on top of the box and so the the the exposure to the copy note in Houdini 5  and copy stamping which is the old way of kind of iterating through a loop  was really just mind-boggling to me and and I knew that it was something that was very powerful  got it okay so I know you've got some really interesting projects that you have recently done in Houdini and  you know there was an example that we were talking about I think it was a commercial that you recently did and you were talking about how it was under super time pressure and you know you were you were conveying that the power of and flexibility of Houdini allowed you to actually do this project maybe you want to go there and sure let me share my screen and let me let me pull up the video give me one moment here just pull up the video  and I will share my screen  I won't share the whole video  but I will so yeah so it was it was basically what the idea was is it's a commercial for miller lite  and initially they were going to render it in unity and so pierre from golden had reached out to me and  and I started working on it we had a very very very fast turnaround we had to build all of the environments animate everything and so we used this kind of hybrid  games approach that was for decentraland so the aesthetic of it had to be this kind of low res  decentraland proxy kind of world so very flat game kind of shading but then we added a little bit more it was rendered in red [ __ ]  but my job was to build out a lot of the environments get a lot of the animation repeated build out the crowd system  and build out variations and build up the bulk of the environments  so I can just you know play so we built out this giant theater this woman opening that this all pr everything was all procedural this all this  these worlds were all built in Houdini  so so just sorry I think again in the interest of the Maya users when you say it's procedure what what what what's the implications of it being procedural from a practical point of view a practical project yeah so I mean here let's let's look at this crowd system right I'm not actually I'm not using crowds  I love Houdini's crowd system but this was so simple that we didn't even need to use it so I basically you know I needed to be able to populate this with a giant group of characters really efficiently and and quickly and and so here's the Houdini scene and it's actually really just simple it's just a single character and t pose and I used  the new  kind effects in  Houdini in order to be able to bring in a few different animations so up here I'm just these are just literally mixamo animations I went and got some you know seeding up and cheering  there's not even that many of them there's only four as an example and then  you can use these bone deforms and then here I'm running it just through a for loop right and the idea of that is that in here you can see as an example  is this is the points from all of the seats right so in the construction of the seeds I just make sure that I include a point in there and then  I can give it some various attributes and randomization and in the end  I just  cut it in half so I only have half the arena that's all we need and you can see that there's a bunch of  different attributes on there animation switch  orient  and p scale and then  then the idea of the for loop in Houdini is really just one of the most powerful things that there is the idea of this this is a what they call for each points so it operates on each individual point and it allows you to create  iterations and move through  something so you basically are operating on one thing so if I was to like click here right  there's my one character and you can see he's clapping  whatever right and  and and  but because we're doing it in a for loop it allows me to iterate over with  some simple very simple expressions and then basically to be able to like assign  this is some vex code that just basically assigns some ids and then here you'll see it's going to take a second  to rebuild this hopefully it'll be okay with zoom sometimes zoom can steal the power there it goes and we end up getting our crowd  of people  and  and each one has now has  an instance id right id right there which then allows me to basically  propagate all these different colors and put them across the board so that you can randomize how things are differently  colored you'll see momentarily so we get a giant crowd it's really a very simple system it took me about you know maybe four hours of putting this all together not from scratch because I'd already had other things but then here's the real fascinating thing about Houdini and the way that Houdini works is because Houdini is so efficient it can create these really good hierarchical data structures if you look here you can see that we have 37 million  points which is just try to open that in Maya right 37 million polygons rather 602 700. and  you can see that it's taking up 9.25  gigabytes of information and that this is direct  memory consumption so if you've set your things up correctly and you've worked you know and you've worked and you've kind of put a few things that you've done to your geometry correctly you can do this thing called packing and this will work in  it's an Alembic so you can export Alembic’s because they're a hierarchical data structure we'll  use this data and you can see now that the memory footprint literally we have one pack geo and the memory footprint of it goes down to 2.8 kilobytes and and and you can't it you know you can't  you can't select anything anymore the geometry kind of becomes locked and all of the attributes kind of become written down onto one points and now when you render obviously it's going to take up much more memory than a 2.8 kilobytes but that is the actual memory that it's taking up on your CPU for processing it right once you pass it to the renderer that will change but not as crazily  you know like for the during the creative process this gives you a whole lot more freedom and flexibility particularly if you have a you know a low low powered machine right yeah absolutely you if you like I mean this will take I mean redshift right without this the render was like an hour per frame and once this goes on correctly that it what goes back down to a normal four or five minute per frame just how it is using the memory and I mean it also just load up and  etc. so then they can just get written out to like an alembic and you can render it in cinema or whatever you want you know so the procedural  framework that you have set up  allows you if you're if your client says hey Jordan I like what you've done here but we need to make a small change and whatever that small change is they did it many times yeah so so yeah give us give us maybe a practical example of that happening this is also a you know yeah let me let me let me show I have this other one here this is a test bed so this is not like a a a final product or anything along those lines right but this is this is  basically the same kind of con conceptual methodology you know so so you could imagine like in this situation like let's say they want to  control the color palettes of all the different t-shirts on there well the way that we have it  is that  they're ramp controllable so like the art director comes by and they want to completely change out all the different color palettes on everything then it's just a matter of  switching out the color palettes on a ramp you know  and you can iterate really quickly this way you know I always  take a tool approach to everything that I do so as an example  you know like for instance let me show here let's do you know we build out a bunch of different procedural tools as an example to be able to procedurally model and and we take this approach to everything that we do and so we have a you know everything that we have basically become some kind of tool eventually that gets put into this system so that we can make changes really easily this is I almost always approach all projects this way and I have a large extensive set of tools for building out a variety of things and you know as an example like when  I'm working on projects  you know I either use the tools that we have or I  adopt the tools that we have for some other kind of thing so as an example this crowd system was made somewhere else you can see that I have something similar right here so  it allows you to be able to move really fast because you can you can actually build tools that you can reuse over and over and over and over again so when you've developed some kind of good methodology eventually you build up a little bit of a library of those kinds of things you know so you can for any given project that comes along you can leverage that prior work and to help accelerate them yeah and you can build it into your own pipeline so you can see here I have all my tools are here  they're all really well organized  and like we use them for everything from you know world building and unreal and unity yeah what you're showing there Jordan is something you've created right this is this wouldn't be coming with oh yeah no no no these are all proprietary tools that we've built you know like here's one for  making bridges you know  so we can make all kinds of different bridges   I have a lot of different things for building out architectural  architectural worlds and and things like this you know so we can make and feed those into other tools and  etc. so we have a large variety of tools that we built for all kinds of different situations you know  those tools seem like they would be universally applicable not not just for your own purposes have you thought of making them available somehow to others well we're we're looking into we I don't yeah there's we have a certain that the yeah I mean a lot of these are proprietary tools that we use and and we do yes we do  you know here's another one this is like one I love this simple this is a simple tool here for hanging cloth you know that you know like if you and this is one of the the great things about how Houdini just functions is that you know like you can just like literally just make these really simple tools I'm no brainiac you know and and you know I build them a lot for going into unreal engine and unity so we I am thinking of a way of putting them out into the world but also  you know I'm very interested right now in web 3.0 web 3 technology so we're we have a lot of this world building stuff that we want to do for the web and   I don't want to just release the tools so everyone has access to my tools kind of but I don't it's a it's a tough question for me yeah I can I can understand because  this this in some ways gives you an artistic competitive advantage  so yeah it's a it's a it's a challenging question understood huge pretending that it is yeah for sure Jordan we just just a time texture to let you know we have about eight minutes left  I think we've at least I've covered a lot of your career and and  you know your how you began your Houdini journey and you know what are some of the advantages of that and why you took that route but  is there anything else that that  you want to cover before we yeah let me I'll show a few quick things if you want  I'll show you I'll show you  I let's see I want to let me find  there's a few things that I wanted to show so I mean truthfully this this show here is probably one of my proudest  one of the things that I'm the proudest of this is the amon tobin projection mapping show that we did at v squared labs  it was an awesome job to be a part of  it was really only four artists  on our end working there's a early there's touch designer working which is like Houdini but it's  a different piece of software and  you know there's carlos saw working on his world he's working in 3d Studio Max I mean in Cinema 4d carlos a great great artist and you know this was kind of like  after coming off Michael Jackson and working on this job this is one of the jobs that really made me interested in the merger of technology and rendering and doing all the different kinds of things that this introduced me to  and it I had known about touch designer but this was the job that I really started first using  touch designer on and  and then doing some projection mapping this is davie force's look  and then there's the live show with them on top of cool stuff very cool and and and so  yeah there's my there's one hey Jordan if somebody wanted to take a peek at this would this be on your website yeah this is all on my on my on my website do you want to quickly  mention what the URL is yeah it's Jordanhalsey.com justmyname.com j-o-r-d-a-n-h-a-l-s-e-y um and then I'll just show this one real quick too I did this with my friend  Adam there was a bunch of people involved on this and  and the idea was to be able to  drive a go-kart in VR and  so you're actually wearing a helmet  and so you're you can't see the world and then we build it the world's out in Houdini  to be able to match  the real world environment  very accurately so that we don't have any problems and then  syncing it up and aligning the two for virtual reality and and so you know like  you know like this was also kind of like the beginning of a little bit of my kind of com you know  really much more kind of current real-time kind of data input information it's really good I want to give that a try stuff that we look forward to do you know so  one thing I'll show  real quick too it's just for people that are interested  and if you do happen to know a little bit of Houdini  I wanted just to  mention that there is  this software here it's touch designer  it's an amazing piece of software too and  you can learn it for free and it's their free version is a little different than Houdini which you can learn it and then if you ever buy it's only 600 bucks you can like  just it's the same file format so you just like sign in with your license and make a license  but this is like what we use a lot for like projection mapping it's a great piece of software  to work in conjunction with  Houdini if you're a Houdini artist and it allows you to kind of like explore things in real time and just like Houdini it has a lot of the same naming and constructs of socks and chops  and stuff like that it's quite an interesting program as well that not that many people are as familiar with  so that's interesting because grid markets is looking to support various complementary solutions to Houdini for example we recently announced support for the axiom solver and there's there's others to to follow  I'm wondering maybe maybe we can take this up after  you know the thing about it I think that we could talk about it I think it's a very different because it's it's real time okay it's all real time so it's there's no it's all GPU-based real-time stuff we got you okay cool but yeah so all right Jordan  we're at the top of the hour so I'm gonna be rude and and transition to landing the webinar  before I do it you know really interesting career you're a risk taker  you know you've you've done things that other people would probably be loath to do or certainly  you know very afraid to do I should say so I think you've inspired people with your risk taking but it's not foolish risk-taking you know it's cut as you said it's calculated risk-taking there are many things you have done prior to actually taking the risk which you know has lowered the risk  I think you've you've also done that out of necessity as well  but also out of curiosity you seem to be you know it's just it's just  tinkering is as you said is something that drives you and so I think that's that's a really interesting message and inspirational for all the other artists who are out there so Jordan thanks for sharing that story with us we really appreciate it it's  it's fascinating oh thank you very much yeah I mean just I'll say one thing real quick which is I've used your service and to get me through tough rendering solutions in the past is and it's always worked fantastic for me that's the one that I recommend I've recommended it to students and other people as well and  so thank you very much for having me yeah I think you're a great interesting company with what you're doing well happy to hear those kind words thank you Jordan in fact if if you hadn't used it we wouldn't have met you so that's  that's kind of how we got here today so thanks for those kind words Jordan okay I'm going to share my screen and remind everyone of the the promotional code if you want to take advantage of it just give me a second here to transition there we go Jordan can you see that just yeah yeah great okay so yeah as a reminder here's the promo code  use that get 15 discount on any credits you buy with us and I also wanted to give everyone a heads up that our next webinar is with the infamous Kate she's been with us before I think a lot of you know her she's very well known she she and I grid markets are working together on some  molecular simulations and visualizations and she's going to be talking about like you Jordan she's developed some Houdini procedures that will facilitate the creation of molecules and the visualization of molecules you created is what yes I was gonna say it's got kind of analogous to the tools that you created to help instantly create bridges and Houdini and so on so she's she's creating some tools which are helping this is why teeny is that what this is I'm not sure right yeah I think she's she's great I'm creating the tools within within Houdini and  and so we're going to be talking about that in her her upcoming webinar check it out and and join us if you like it gridmarkets.com webinars you'll see the the location there that you can use to to attend the webinar which is on may 24th okay so that's it everyone thank you again Jordan for attending thank you everyone else for joining us and thank you ben for for speaking about oracle and and how the platform is robustly engineered and secured so appreciate that Adam thank you and with that we'll bring it to a close.