If you’re a VFX artist working from your home studio, you may be painfully familiar with this chain of events:

Step 1: Finish a brand new element for a project.

Step 2: Render and export the element for approval. 

Step 3: Upload your export to a cloud drive. 

Step 4: Email the link to the file to the other members of your team for approval. 

Step 5: Receive the first email with notes.

Step 6: Receive five more emails with additional notes, all out of sequence. 

Step 7: Begin to make changes while still receiving revision emails. 

Step 8: Repeat Steps 1-7 until a permanent impression of your forehead is imprinted onto the desk. 

You’re not alone in wanting to find a better way to collaborate with your team and get projects done faster. 

The most obvious solution to this email and revision hellscape in a remote-work world is to try to stream your SideFX Houdini workspace directly over a video conferencing platform like the ever-popular Zoom. This way, you can chat and receive feedback in real-time and significantly cut down on time-wasting draft reviews and email chains. 

However, with a processor-heavy program like SideFX Houdini, is this a realistic solution for VFX artists and animators? 

In this article, we’ll examine some common workarounds that can be used to stream SideFX Houdini over Zoom and see if they can meet the needs of modern VFX teams. 

What are the Challenges of Streaming SideFX Houdini Over Zoom?

If you remember how your laptop or desktop fans used to spin like an over-enthusiastic DJ when you first started working with professional effects programs like SideFX Houdini, then you know the first problem we’re going to discuss; processor power. 

This is an immediate problem when it comes to streaming over Zoom because Zoom itself demands a significant amount of processing power as well. The focus of Zoom’s design is for basic conversations or screen-sharing web pages and documents, and it doesn’t like to compete with other CPU-heavy programs. 

When Zoom does have to compete for resources, it will attempt to balance the load by downgrading the quality of the stream on one or both ends. This not only can result in a loss of video quality but can also lead to other issues like video lag and application crashes. 

All this aside, the key benefit of Zoom is that it is so universal, nearly everyone already has it installed on their computer and knows how to operate it. Because of that, it seems worthwhile to see if there are any workarounds that will allow you to stream your SideFX Houdini workspace over Zoom well enough that you can collaborate with your team in real-time during your editing and review sessions.