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Houdini is a procedural 3D application developed by Toronto-based Side Effects Software. Currently in its 14th iteration, the first version was released back in 1996 (though its roots can be traced back to Prisms, a software developed in the 1980s).
I have been using Houdini since version 8 and to be honest I have always been extremely impressed with what the software is capable of. Coming from a 3DS Max background, with almost 14 years of experience with the software, working on something like Houdini was a revelation of sorts. The procedural node-based approach allowed for a kind of flexibility that I had never experienced before. Even though at times this approach can be extremely technical and a little dense the end results always justified the efforts.
Now, around version 8, the Houdini interface was not the most user-friendly but since then Side Effects Software has made a major effort towards making the software more approachable. This started with the release of Houdini 9, which introduced, among other things, a brand new interface, material system and the physically-based renderer. A major internal re-write was carried out in Version 12 making the entire software a lot more memory efficient and multi-threaded. Along with that there has also been a continuous effort in improving the interface and viewport performance.
Version 14 once again makes major improvements on that front. The viewport, selection process and general user experience has received a huge upgrade with this version. Along with that, improvements have been made to the animation editor along with the introduction of the Animation layers panel. There is a brand new crowd simulation system and Position-Based Dynamics which allow for simulating sand, snow and various soft body effects. UV mapping has been improved and also the hair tools have been updated.
Let’s start with the biggest improvement in this version, the user experience.
The Houdini viewport and selection has always been finicky. This always made poly modeling tasks in Houdini a little irritating. Selecting polygons and vertices was always a bit of a hit and miss. With this version it seems that Side Effects finally listened to the users. Special attention has been put towards improving viewport interaction and selection. When you open Houdini 14, you are now greeted with a new gradient based viewport. This can be switched back to the default grey, if that is your preference. There is also an on-screen help for various functions.
A brand new point, polygon and edge loop and ring selection methods have
been added and are much faster than anything available before. The
viewport-based help provides the user with the shortcuts required to
make the selections. The general method is to press the "A" key and use
the mouse to make a loop or a ring selection.
There is also a new HUD that allows you to select elements based on Groups, UV connectivity or 3D connectivity.
There are new handles for box, sphere and grid objects. I hope more such handles are added to other tools in future releases as they make the modeling process more fluid. Also with every node that gets added viewport sliders show up with the relevant parameters.
The Move gizmo has been updated allowing the user to move the object in two axis at the same time, this was something that I have always missed since I shifted from 3DS Max. Also you can use the middle mouse button to indirectly drag the object.
Major improvements have been made to the UV Mapping and Unwrapping workflow. There are brand new UV flatten, Pelting and layout tools along with the ability to visualize UV Distortion.
A new and improved color picker has been added that has the ability to show color based on temperature. This is very helpful when setting colors for lights, since I prefer to set light colors based on temperature. You can also display a secondary color palette based on the current color selection.
Along with all this, viewport playback speed has also been improved tremendously. In a crowd scene that I tested with over 2000 agents the viewport showed no lag at all.
There have also been minor and major tweaks to the parameter interfaces of various nodes, most notably the Mantra render node which has been restructured in a more logical fashion.
There is also a new Digital Assets menu that makes for easier editing and loading of Digital Assets into Houdini. Also the native format for digital assets has been changed from .otl to .hda.
Overall a lot of thought has been put into making the workflow and user interaction more fluid and streamlined and even though things can be improved further, it is a very big step in the right direction.
A brand new Crowd system has been added that is actually a very good showcase of how much the instancing, animation and viewport capabilities have been improved.
There is a new Crowd Shelf which has all the tools required to quickly set up a basic crowd simulation. Even though the resulting node tree can look complex the buttons on the shelf allow for a very simple click-based approach to setting things up. There are tools for putting crowds on a Path and even on a terrain. You can also add obstacles in their paths.
The crowds can be laid out in a grid like fashion or scattered randomly. According to the Houdini help this release contains the basic building blocks for setting up a Crowd system with many more improvements to come in the upcoming versions. But as it stands you can use these basic building blocks to create fairly complex Crowds.
Houdini had added a brand new set of Hair grooming tools into a new Hair grooming shelf set. These tools allow you to do a whole range of hair modifications.
The new tools allow for cutting, drawing and clumping of hair along with a whole host of other capabilities. The new tools also allow you to paint hair guides directly onto surfaces using a brush or even plant individual guides by clicking on a surface. The new tools work on Hair Guides and make it much easier to create longer hair instead of just fur.
They seemed to function slightly slowly in the viewport but this could be just an issue on my machine. But overall they are a big addition to the existing Hair and Fur tools in Houdini, especially for styling long hair.
The other major addition to the Houdini VFX toolset in this version is the new position-based particle dynamics solver. This solver allows for a variety of effects including wet and dry sand and snow. You can also create soft body effects, thin sheets and strands.
The overall system is quite fast and robust. The setup once again is based on a few clicks of button from the shelf toolbar.
A new Pointdeform SOP has been added to the Geometry toolset which allows you to deform geometry based on particle movement. So it’s easy to transfer the PBD soft body effects to its relevant geometry. This is similar to the particle skinner modifier from 3DS Max.
A majority of the parameters are within the Grain Update node in DOPs (Dynamics) and the Grain Source Node in SOPS. These two nodes allow you to set up any kind of PBD effect that you would want. When you create a Granular Solid, Houdini automatically creates the node tree for the Pointdeform SOP. This definitely makes things easier. But overall this a great addition to the already massive and robust dynamics tool set in Houdini.
Along with this there is now a colored blue line that appears in the timeline when a Dynamics Simulation is cached. It’s similar to the green line that appears in After Effects when you do a RAM preview.
In order to test out the Bullet Dynamics speed, I did a simple test of a collapsing tower made of 6800 boxes. Houdini 13 took nearly 2 mins 15 secs to calculate 50 frames, whereas Houdini 14 did the same simulation in 1 min 1 second. That's less than half the time, which was quite impressive.
I wasn’t able to test out the other dynamics tools but the help also says that the FEM solver and the FLIP solver have both received similar improvements in speed and memory management.
The channel editor which has been renamed to Animation Editor has received a major overhaul in this version.
The channels are now listed in collapsible groups which makes it easier to navigate. The curve display has been improved and there is also an automatic snapshot of the channel curve once you start modifying it with the option to revert back to the previous snapshot.
The Scale Handle tool has been revamped and enhanced and is now called Box Tool which can be activated by pressing Y on the keyboard. There is also an option to set the pivot of the Box tool to help you better control the scaling.
The other major addition to the animation toolset is the new Animation Layers system.
The system is quite easy to use. All you have to do is select any animated channel, go to the Animation Layers panel in the Animation Editor, click on the little gears icon and create and animation layer. This will create a base layer for your channel. Then you can create subsequent layers to add additional animation to your channel.
In the background this system creates a CHOPs network that stores the animation of every layer in its own Channel Node, which are then merged into a Layers Node. This allows for a lot of flexibility as you can go into the CHOPS network and modify these base nodes as you see fit. However the Layers Node should not be modified as the changes made in the CHOPS network do not reflect back in the Animation Layers panel.
Along with this, major improvements have been made to the animation playback and performance speed. Improvements have been made across the board to everything from Bone Display, Alembic playback, character deformation and even motion capture performance.
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.
Video review of various other additions and improvements
At the modeling level, a new uniform scale parameter has been added to the basic primitives that makes scaling them a lot simpler.
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.
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.
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