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)