Houdini HIVE Presentations in Utrecht 2018

At Houdini HIVE Utrecht, the community came together for a packed day of informative sessions in two tracks: Advertising/Motion Graphics and Video Game Development. Below are online videos of some of presentations where recording was possible.

How do you create 100 square km of wilderness with a terrain changing every day? One of the challenges with a modern open world is its sheer size. Not every square meter of the world will receive the attention of a level artist or a level designer. Yet while filling empty space is easy, creating natural-looking environments is a bigger challenge.

Ubisoft's solution on 'Far Cry 5' was to develop a set of procedural tools to generate biomes, texture the terrain, setup freshwater networks, generate cliff rocks and more. Procedural technical artist Étienne Carrier walks you through how they tacked this challenge. Details can be viewed here.

SideFX at the Oscars

SideFX wins the extremely rare Academy Award of Merit for the creation and development of the Houdini visual effects and animation system.

In case you missed it, SideFX wins not one but 2 awards. The Academy Award of Merit and Scientific Engineering Award for the creation and development of the Houdini visual effects and animation system. The Academy Award of Merit was accepted by Kim Davidson and Mark Elendt.

In the same ceremony, Sir Patrick Stewart also presented a Scientific and Engineering Award to Jeff Lait, Mark Tucker, Cristin Barghiel and John Lynch for their contributions to the design and architecture of the Houdini visual effects and animation system. Details can be viewed here.

Houdini 16 unleashed

it is here!
SideFX is proud to announce the release of Houdini 16.


Houdini 16 is a feature-packed release that includes:

• - A brand new Network Editor designed from the ground up to be faster, more customizable, and easier to organize.
• - Radial Menus for faster access to your favorite tools.
• - Modeling tools such as Poly Fill, Smooth, and brand new Booleans.
• - A 2D/3D Terrain Generation workflow that includes height fields, 2D erosion, and support for importing LIDAR/Geo-fill.
• - Character animation tools such as Auto-rigging, Invisible rigs, and Bi-harmonic Capturing.
• - Rendering tools such as a New Material Context and a new Principled (Disney) Uber-shader.
• - VFX tools include enhancements to FLIP Fluids such as Suction Force and improved Viscosity.
• - Ocean tools now include Layered Ocean Spectra for non-tiling oceans, the ability to hand-animate a hero wave, and Guided Ocean simulations.

There are many more new features in the new release. here. Please refer to the What's New section in the Houdini 16 documentation for a more complete feature list.

In case you missed it. Check out the key new features, including walkthroughs by the technical artists and developers who built it. Keynote and Details can be found here.

"Houdini 15.5 delivers great production-inspired features both to our established community and our emerging user base. There’s a lot more included than in a typical point release, as we’ve been able to finalize a wide range of features well ahead of our major release schedule." Details can be found here.

Third Party Rendering support in Houdini Indie will be available when Houdini 15.5 is released at the end of May 2016. All of the renderers listed here will work within the existing Houdini Indie render limits - 1920x1080 for animation sequences and unlimited for still images. Rendering in Houdini Indie will go directly to the renderer without saving out render description files.