3DS Max Plugins
3DS Max Plugins
Film Trailers
Videos
Videos
Reviews
Houdini is a procedural 3D application developed by Toronto-based Side Effects Software. It was originally released back in 1996 and today we'll be reviewing version 15 of the software.
I didn’t expect to review Houdini twice in one year. Houdini 15 has been released a mere 9 months after version 14 but that doesn't make it any less feature rich than the previous release. In fact it's genuinely impressive how much they've managed to add in such a short time.
This time around the big push is towards the modeling tools, shading and lighting along with additions to the animation toolset and the fluids system.
But let's start by looking at the enhancements made to the viewport and interface.
The viewport is now capable of displaying UDIM and Mari-style tiled textures. It can also display GGX and PBR shaders more accurately. You can view world-space normal maps in the viewport too. Along with meshes, even curves can now be subdivided in the viewport. This allows for better and faster display of hair and fur. Subdivision Curves are also supported in Mantra for faster hair and fur rendering.
The viewport also displays HDR lighting a lot better than the previous version.
One of the big additions to Houdini are Visualizers. These were available in the previous version but now they are much improved and easier to add to objects.
Visualizers allow the user to display a range of data in the viewport, such as name tags, which can be displayed even if the object is off-screen and can also be used for selecting the object. They can also display attributes like Normals, Velocity or any other custom attribute and even cross-sections of volumes. This can be added in two ways. It can be added via the gear icon in the parameters pane or by pressing “x” on any geometry node which adds a Visualizer node.
Houdini has always been thought of as being relatively weak when it comes to basic polygon modeling. With this version and the previous one it has tried to address that area of weakness. In Houdini 15, Side Effects has added and modified some of the major poly modeling tools.
First, Houdini finally has a Polybridge tool. Personally, coming from a 3DS Max background this is a tool I’ve always missed and I’m really glad this has been added. It is capable of bridging multiple polygons at the same time and since the tool remains live, any transformations or changes made to the geometry upstream are automatically taken care of.
The bridge tool also has options to control the shape of the bridge using a spline ramp, and can also follow a curve if needed.
Similar functionality has been added to the revamped Polyextrude tool. It has a brand new interface and also has the ability to add vertex normals to the extruded geometry. The extrude from curve option seems to be a little buggy, as I sometimes got twisted polygons along the path.
Another new tool that has been added is called Polyexpand2D. This is great for creating outlines out of 2D shapes and polygons, which makes it good for creating walls and roads amongst other things.
Along with this, there is a brand new retopology tool called Topo Build, which will allow the user to trace and rebuild the underlying geometry.
For editing and tweaking geometry, the Edit tool is now capable of multi-selection and also has the option for Edge Sliding. There is an option to visualize soft selection as well. All these things combined definitely make the basic poly modeling tasks a lot better.
There is a new Looping method which uses the Block Begin and Block End nodes to define the loop. It does take a little getting used to since it’s a brand new system but the idea is to keep everything at one level as it doesn’t require the user to jump inside a subnet like the Foreach Node. This looping method has also been added to the VOP context. To ease the learning curve, Side Effects has provided a comprehensive masterclass for the new looping method.
Houdini is starting to shift away from using local variables to attributes. So now the user can directly use VEX instead of typing the older local variables, eg @P.x can also be used to get the position X instead of the older $TX. This can cause some confusion, as this is an ongoing process and it will be different for a lot of Houdini users.
On the animation side of things, Houdini viewport now supports onion skinning with the option to set a number of before and after frames.
There are also improvements in the Dope Sheet, with the addition of a ripple tool and the ability to box select keyframes. In the curve editor you can set automatic slope and also cycle animations beyond the keyframe range.
But the bigger additions are on the character animation side of things. There are two new simple rigs that have been added, one for male and one for female. Both rigs have onion skinning and render as subdivision controls. They also have squash and stretch controls.
Dual quaternion skinning has been added for better skinning and deformation of characters.
There is also a new character picker pane and a pose library pane. All the simple rigs have built-in poses and can be displayed in the character picker pane. The Pose library pane is fairly simple to use and also allows the user to save and load custom poses.
In Houdini 15, there are new shelf tools for setting up Viscous fluids which allow the user to generate Lava and also Melt objects. Even though this could be done before, the shelf tools make it a lot easier to setup.
This is done using the new Gas Temperature Update node, which allows the user to set a cooling rate for the liquid which solidifies the liquid over time. Also using the shelf tools for heat and cool object the user can transfer temperature from an object to the liquid. This allows the user to melt something when it touches another object, like a hot knife going through butter.
To support this there is also a new Lava shader which helps make the rendering process simpler. The Lava shader uses the new Principled Shader which I will talk about in the rendering section.
In order to facilitate very large scale fluid simulations, Houdini 15 has added a new Fluid Compress node which allows the user to radically reduce the number of particles and voxels that are stored to the disc without losing any details of the simulation. This helps in saving disc space and overall memory consumption.
This has been coupled with a brand new Particle Surface node which can use the compressed fluid data to build the fluid surface. It also has a bunch of previewing options for faster playback in the viewport which include culling the particle data using a bounding box or the camera frustum.
The surfacing of fluids has also been improved by allowing the user to generate masks for the fluid smoothing operations so that you can maintain a higher density mesh where there is a lot of movement in the fluid but drastically reduce the mesh where the fluid is calm.
The white-water system has also been improved. It allows the user to reseed the compressed fluid data to generate underwater bubbles and stuff and it also allows for distribution of the white-water simulation on multiple machines based on the camera frustum.
Distributed Sims have also been improved. Flip Solver now has a global pressure option so that there are no artifacts at the seams in distributed sims. Side Effects says that the Fluid System is now capable of simulating over two billion particles. Of course, I haven't really tested this since I don't have a super computer at home.
But the point being that everything has been improved to make it as memory efficient as possible to facilitate very large simulation, in case you ever want to make 2012 Part II.
The biggest addition to the Crowds system is Ragdoll dynamics which uses the Bullet Solver. The new Collision Layer and Collision Joints tools help the user setup the collision joints and rotation limits for the ragdoll. These are fully capable of interacting with fire, smoke and sand simulations.
The FEM solver is said to be, in certain scenarios, up to 10x faster than Houdini 14. Even though on a simple scene created in Houdini 14 with the pig head as a Solid Object and re-simulated in Houdini 15, I didn’t really notice a very large speed difference. The viewport playback speed, however, has been vastly improved from version 14.
The Solid object and the Cloth object now have new controls for self-collision and the viewport is much faster when displaying large number of tetrahedrons and polygons. Also Solid Object now uses separate geometry for simulation and rendering. This is done using the new Solid Embed geometry node, which is a digital asset that encapsulates the older Remesh tool. This method is called embedding and there is an option in both the Solid object and the cloth object to turn it off and use the actual mesh itself.
However, when using the embedded method there can be a really good increase in speed since you end up calculating on a much lighter mesh and then transferring the deformation to your original heavier mesh.
The POP solver now has the option now to put particles into auto-sleep and can be woken up using the POP awaken node when close-by particles or objects start moving. This is really helpful when dealing with very large Grain simulations. This way only the particles closest to a moving object will get simulated and the others will remain dormant.
One of the biggest areas of improvement in this version is the addition and update of the various shaders that are available in Houdini. The push is towards making the materials more physically plausible right out of the box.
The big addition is the new Principled Shader which is based on the Disney Principled BRDF Shader. This is an excellent shader that lets you build a majority of materials with a minimal set of controls. It is also compatible with the PBR metalness and roughness workflow, so if you are used to painting textures and building shaders with Substance Painter or Substance Designer then those shaders and maps will work perfectly with the Principled Shader. The shader also has a built-in secondary coat layer that makes it fairly simple to set up layered shaders.
Even the base Mantra Shader has been updated to be more physically accurate. There is a new metallic reflection and edge tint parameter which allows the user to easily create metal and also now by default the fresnel blending is on, to give a more natural reflection falloff.
In order to support the new PBR approach, SideFX now provides a library of royalty-free PBR ready textures that are available for download for free from their website.
Also in the bump map setting in both the Mantra Shader and the Principled Shader the user can set different bump maps for the base layer and the coat layer. So if you want the base layer to be distorted using a bump map and the coat layer to be clean then this is now possible.
Beyond this, Houdini now has a bunch of custom shaders which include, Car Paint, Brushed metal, Glass and also a custom Skin shader. There is also a new Toon shader available.
All these shaders are now precompiled Digital Assets, which makes them load faster in scenes where there are a lot of materials. If you do wish to see their node structure, then you need to unlock the Digital Asset, otherwise the node structure is invisible.
Along with this, within the Shader Builder you now have the ability to layer shaders ,which also makes it easier to build more complex materials. Houdini has also updated the base PBR nodes, such as the PBR Diffuse and the PBR Specular. The PBR Specular now has a built-in Fresnel, so it’s much easier to set up. Since these nodes form the basic building blocks for any shader, making them more fully featured makes the user’s life simpler when you want to build custom shaders from scratch. To use custom built shaders, Houdini provides a new Layer Pack node, which gives the user a layer output to add it to the layer mix node.
At the texture level, there is a new Displace texture, which has built-in support for bump, normal and vector displacement. There is also a new map which can convert bump maps to normal maps.
For volumetrics the Pyro Shader has been greatly simplified. All the most commonly used parameters are now in one tab and the stuff that was rarely used has been removed in order to streamline everything.
At lighting level, lights by default are set to physically correct attenuation giving them a much better falloff. There is a new Exposure parameter and the user can now create a light based on the current view and it also automatically sets the light intensity. Along with this there is a new tube light option.
Houdini also now ships with a whole bunch of IES files for more custom light profiles.
On the rendering front, there are several minor but important improvements. The IPR window now shows elapsed and final render time along with time remaining and memory usage. A new feature called Checkpoint has been added, which lets the user restart a render. So if you stopped your render mid-way for some reason then it can be restarted. For this the file has to be stored in either Mantra’s native image formats namely .pic and .rat or saved to OpenEXR.
In Mantra, there are new quality controls for Diffuse, Reflection and Refraction. These act as global multipliers on top of the already set sampling values. These parameters can also be set on a per object level. So if you just want to focus additional samples on particular object, then that can be done, too.
Houdini has added a brand new Bake Texture node. This node will allow the user to bake a variety of textures including Occlusion, Cavity, Thickness and normal maps. You can also bake out the final shader to texture.
Finally, Houdini now supports Renderman 20 and RIS shading. There are built-in Renderman lights and shaders and the user can also build custom RIS shaders in the shader network. However, these are only available in the full Houdini version and not in Indie or in Apprentice, since those two versions do not support third party renderers.
The only thing that I can say in conclusion is that even though this version was released barely nine months after the release of Houdini 14, it’s impressive how many new features have been added in such a small time frame.
I am especially happy with the improvements to the modeling toolset, and being someone who enjoys lighting and shading, I can say that the new shaders are really impressive and make the overall shader building process a lot simpler. The enhancements to FLIP fluids and POP grains are great for VFX artists who deal with very large simulations and the new viscous tools allow the user to set up viscous fluids very easily. Overall this is an excellent release.
Software
Films
Videos
Tech & Research
Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy | Cookie Policy
Copyright ©2000-2024 CGPress. All rights reserved.