TOPs Masterclass | Matt Estela | CG Wiki | EPC 2025 HIVE

A walkthrough of TOPs from first principles through to complex production-level workflows. TOPs is a procedural architecture designed to distribute tasks and manage dependencies to better scale, automate, and analyze content pipelines for Film, TV, Games, Advertising and VR. TOP nodes integrate seamlessly with the rest of Houdini. This brings the power of TOPs to FX, Games, Motion Graphics and other workflows. TOPs also works with technologies such as Houdini Engine. Matt Estela has a long and varied career in VFX and animation, with experience at studios like Animal Logic and Framestore CFC. He is also known for his expertise in Houdini, and for contributing to CG educational resources. He is a currently a Senior Houdini Artist at Google, and used Gemini to write this bio. 00:00 Introduction to the TOPS Masterclass 10:17 Setting Up Image File Naming 20:34 Local Workflows and Network Context 30:50 File Pattern and Jumping Contexts 41:07 Understanding Output and File Structure 51:26 Cook Behavior and GUI Sessions 01:01:42 Common Gotchas and Troubleshooting 01:11:58 Randomized Inputs and Variation 01:22:13 Using TOPS with Shotgun Integration 01:32:30 Visualization vs Actual Processing Flow