Houdini (software)
Houdini is a 3D animation application software developed by Side Effects Software based in Toronto. Side Effects adapted Houdini from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools. Its exclusive attention to procedural generation distinguishes it from other 3D computer graphics software.
Houdini has been used in various feature animation productions, including Disney's feature films Frozen and Zootopia; the Blue Sky Studios film Rio, and DNA Productions' Ant Bully.
Side Effects also publishes a partially limited version called Houdini Apprentice, which is free of charge for non-commercial use.
Contents
Features
Houdini covers all the major areas of 3D production, including:
- Modeling - All standard geometry entities including Polygons, (Hierarchical) NURBs/Bézier Curves/Patches & Trims, Metaballs
- Animation - Keyframed animation and raw channel manipulation (CHOPs), motion capture support
- Particles
- Dynamics - Rigid Body Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, Wire Dynamics, Cloth Simulation, Crowd simulation.
- Lighting - node-based shader authoring, lighting and re-lighting in an IPR viewer
- Rendering - Houdini ships with its native and powerful rending engine Mantra, but the Houdini Indie licence (Houdini version for indie developers) supports other 3rd party rendering engines such as: Renderman, Octane, Arnold, Redshift (beta), V-ray (soon), Maxwell (soon).
- Volumetrics - With its native CloudFx and PyroFx toolsets, Houdini can create clouds, smoke and fire simulations.
- Compositing - full compositor of floating-point deep (layered) images.
- Plugin Development - development libraries for user extensibility.
- Houdini is an open environment and supports a variety of scripting APIs. Python is increasingly the scripting language of choice for the package, and is intended to substitute its original CShell-like scripting language, Hscript. However, any major scripting languages which support socket communication can interface with Houdini.
Operators
Houdini's procedural nature is found in its operators. Digital assets are generally constructed by connecting sequences of operators (or OPs). This proceduralism has several advantages:
- It allows users to construct highly detailed geometric or organic objects in comparatively very few steps compared to other packages
- It enables and encourages non-linear development;
- New operators can be created in terms of existing operators, a flexible alternative to non-procedural scripting often relied on in other packages for customization
Houdini uses this procedural paradigm throughout: for textures, shaders, particles, "channel data" (data used to drive animation), rendering and compositing.
