Houdini 14 review

Other Additions and Improvements

Beyond these, there are numerous other minor improvements and changes made to the software. Below is a video review that goes over these enhancements and the features they bring.

At the modeling level, a new uniform scale parameter has been added to the
basic primitives that makes scaling them a lot simpler.

New scattering options

Rendering points as spheres

The Scatter SOP has been totally rebuilt from the ground up. There are now ways to
scatter points based on density, primitive area and even in texture
space. A new relax option has been added to the Scatter SOP to prevent
the points from overlapping. This distance can now be exported as a
PSCALE attribute which can then be used to scale objects via the Copy
Node.

There is a new Attribute Randomise SOP which allows you to randomise any
attribute value. This can be extremely useful when used along with the
Copy SOP as it can reduce the use of expressions.

The Mantra Surface model, the main Houdini material, has received an
interface update. There is also the addition of the GGX Specular model
and the specular angle parameter has been changed to Roughness. This is
a good change as the naming is consistent with other popular renderers
like V-Ray.

In Mantra there are now separate sampling controls for direct and indirect
lighting. This allows for better control over how many rays will be
used for indirect lighting. So if you have an exterior scene where
mostly everything is illuminated via direct lighting then you can set
less samples for indirect light and reduce render time.

Hair rendering has improved a lot. The hair shader has also been updated and
there is now a new Transmission tab which allows for transparency.

A new option to render Points as Spheres has also been added. This is
quite fast and also much more memory efficient than copying spheres
onto points. This method is now the default method to render
unconnected points instead of the previous method of using discs.

Conclusion

Overall, Houdini 14 is an excellent release. Not only does it add some exciting
new features for VFX, namely Crowds and PBD solver, but it also greatly
improves the user experience.

Houdini has always been slightly awkward for poly modeling, but with the
improvements to the selection system, the viewport handles and HUD it
feels a lot better. A Bridge tool like the one in 3DS Max would be a most welcome
addition to the Houdini poly modeling toolset. It’s one of the few poly
modeling tools I miss from my days using 3DS Max. But overall I am
quite happy with this release.

For those who are planning on learning Houdini, the thing to understand is
that due to the procedural node-based approach of the software there
will always be a higher learning curve. However, Side
Effects has recently launched a new set of Quick Start videos on their
site and along with these there are also a whole bunch of 3rd party
free and paid tutorials available that have made getting into the software much easier than before.

If you don’t mind things getting technical and nodal then Houdini is a software that I would highly recommend.