SideFX Houdini
3D animation application
Wiki SideFX website
Description
Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by Toronto-based SideFX, who adapted it from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools. The procedural tools are used to produce different effects such as complex reflections, animations and particles system. Some of its procedural features have been in existence since 1987.
Houdini is most commonly used for the creation of visual effects in film and games. It is used by major VFX companies such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Double Negative, ILM, MPC, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Method Studios and The Mill.
It has been used in many feature animation productions, including Disney's feature films Fantasia 2000, Frozen, and Zootopia; the Blue Sky Studios film Rio, and DNA Productions' Ant Bully.
SideFX also publishes Houdini Apprentice, a limited version of the software that is free of charge for non-commercial use.
Features
- 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, Rigging, KineFX - 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 SideFX's rendering engines Mantra and Karma; Houdini Indie license and up support 3rd party rendering engines, such as Renderman, Octane, Arnold, Redshift, V-ray, 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, assets for user extensibility using HScript, VEX and Python
Houdini Contexts
Houdini operators (ops)
Object
OBJ
Geometry
GEO
Surface operator SOP
Materials
MAT
(VOP)
Motion & Audio FX
CHOP
channel op
Tasks
PDG
TOP
tasks (ex-output)
ROP
OUT
Output
VEX Builder
vex
Compositing
IMG
COP
Dynamics
DOP
Includes POP
SHOP
shader op (DEPRECIATED)