Mentorship case study · Nearly one year

Giulia Radicchi

Procedural library and kitchen environment

From zero Houdini to working independently

Houdini
VEX
PDG
Copernicus
SpeedTree
Maya
Nuke

Mentor's note

Working with Giulia has been one of the most rewarding mentorship experiences I’ve had.

When we began, she had no knowledge of Houdini. What started as a three-month mentorship naturally evolved into nearly a full year of continuous growth. During that time, I watched her transform from a complete beginner into someone who can work confidently and independently inside Houdini.

Step by step, we built strong foundations. I guided her through scattering systems, vector manipulation, VEX, for-each loops, and procedural problem solving, while also helping her develop the right technical mindset. She learned to stay organized, retrace her steps when debugging, and structure her node graphs clearly with meaningful comments to keep her work clean and maintainable.

I wholeheartedly recommend her and hope our paths cross again in the future.

The work

One procedural book, oriented and randomized, plus material variations by ID: a full procedural library

Procedural book generator and alignment using matchsize and for-each

Full library using TOPs (PDG) to randomize parameters per execution

AOV compositing in Nuke (back-to-beauty workflow)

In Giulia's words

I've had the pleasure to work with Mario for multiple mentorships that have taken place between February 2025 and January 2026. We've seen together a variety of topics, from generative systems in Houdini to the building of the perfect LinkedIn profile, from Copernicus to SpeedTree and so on. The mentorship lectures were always perfectly tailored to my needs, whenever I would come up with an issue, Mario would take it as an opportunity to learn and broaden his knowledge while also helping me with my projects, no challenge was ever too hard. Mario is not only a great teacher, but he's also a wonderful human being, extremely passionate about the CGI world and very capable to pass down this love to his students, making his lessons extremely pleasant to attend and always full of relevant content to learn.
I would recommend Mario with no doubt, especially if you're looking for both an expert teacher and a caring mentor to guide you through difficult times and choices.
I sincerely hope to have the chance to work with Mario again in the future!
Giulia Radicchi

Full breakdown on The Rookies Original recommendation on LinkedIn

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