Houdini is a
3D animation software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consist ...
application developed by
Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...
-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 television. It is used by major VFX companies such as
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene fr ...
,
Pixar,
DreamWorks Animation,
Double Negative
A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. Multiple negation is the more general term referring to the occurrence of more than one negative in a clause. In some languages, ...
,
ILM,
MPC,
Framestore
Framestore is a British animation, visual effects company and creative studio based on Chancery Lane in London. Formed in 1986, it acquired (and subsequently merged with) the Computer Film Company in 1997. It works on feature films and telev ...
,
Sony Pictures Imageworks,
Scanline VFX,
Method Studios and
The Mill.
It has been used in many feature animation productions, including
Disney's
The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
feature films ''
Fantasia 2000'', ''
Frozen'', ''
Zootopia
''Zootopia'' (titled ''Zootropolis'' in various regions) is a 2016 American computer-animated buddy cop action comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 55th Disney animated feature fi ...
''
and ''
Raya and the Last Dragon''; the
Blue Sky Studios film ''
Rio
Rio or Río is the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese word for "river". When spoken on its own, the word often means Rio de Janeiro, a major city in Brazil.
Rio or Río may also refer to:
Geography Brazil
* Rio de Janeiro
* Rio do Sul, a ...
'', 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.
Release history
Features
Houdini covers all the major areas of 3D production, including these:
* 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
* Particles
* Dynamics –
Rigid Body Dynamics,
Fluid Dynamics
In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids— liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including ''aerodynamics'' (the study of air and other gases in motion) a ...
, 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 licence and up support 3rd party rendering engines, such as
Renderman, Octane, Arnold, Redshift,
V-ray
V-Ray is a biased computer-generated imagery rendering software application developed by Bulgarian software company Chaos . V-Ray is a commercial plug-in for third-party 3D computer graphics software applications and is used for visualizati ...
, 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 for user extensibility.
Houdini is an open environment and supports a variety of scripting APIs.
Python is increasingly the scripting language of choice for the package, and is intended to substitute its original C Shell-like scripting language,
HScript. However, any major scripting languages which support socket communication can interface with Houdini.
Tools
Operators
Houdini's procedural nature is found in its operators. Digital assets are generally constructed by connecting sequences of operators (or OPs). This proceduralism has several advantages: it allows users to construct highly detailed geometric or organic objects in comparatively very few steps; it enables and encourages non-linear development; and new operators can be created in terms of existing operators, a flexible alternative to non-procedural scripting often relied on in other packages for customisation. Houdini uses this procedural generation in production of
textures,
shaders,
particles, "channel data" (data used to drive animation),
rendering and
compositing.
Houdini's operator-based structure is divided into several main groups:
*OBJs – nodes that pass transform information (Traditionally these contain SOPs.)
*SOPs – Surface Operators – for procedural modelling.
*POPs – Particle Operators – used to manipulate
particles systems.
*CHOPs – Channel Operators – for procedural animation and audio manipulation.
*COPs – Composite Operators – used to perform compositing on footages.
*DOPs – Dynamic Operators – for dynamic simulations for fluids, cloth, rigid body interaction etc.
*SHOPs – Shading Operator – for representing a dozen or more different shading types for several different renderers.
*ROPs –
render operators – for building networks to represent different render passes and render dependencies.
*VOPs – VEX operators – for building nodes of any of the above types using a highly optimized SIMD architecture.
*TOPs - Task Operators
*LOPs - Lighting Operators - for generating USD describing characters, props, lighting, and rendering.
Operators are connected together in networks. Data flows through, manipulated by each operator in turn. This data could represent 3D
geometry
Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...
,
bitmap images, particles,
dynamics,
shader algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
s,
animation,
audio
Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to:
Sound
*Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound
*Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum
* Digital audio, representation of sou ...
, or a combination of these. This
node graph architecture
Node graph architecture is a software design structured around the notion of a node graph. Both the source code as well as the user interface is designed around the editing and composition (or linking) of atomic functional units.
The source cod ...
is similar to that employed in node-based
compositors such as
Shake or
Nuke.
Complex networks can be grouped into a single
meta-operator node which behaves like a class definition, and can be instantiated in other networks like any compiled node. In this way users can create their own sophisticated tools without the need for programming. In this way Houdini can be regarded as a highly interactive visual programming toolkit which makes programming more accessible to artists.
Houdini's set of tools are mostly implemented as operators. This has led to a higher learning curve than other comparable tools. It is one thing to know what all the nodes do – but the key to success with Houdini is understanding how to represent a desired creative outcome as a network of nodes. Successful users are generally familiar with a large repertoire of networks (algorithms) which achieve standard creative outcomes. The overhead involved in acquiring this repertoire of algorithms is offset by the artistic and algorithmic flexibility afforded by access to lower level building blocks with which to configure shot element creation routines. In large productions, the development of a procedural network to solve a specific element creation challenge makes automation trivial. Many studios that use Houdini on large feature effects, and feature animation projects develop libraries of procedures that can be used to automate generation of many of the elements for that film with almost no artist interaction.
Also unique to Houdini is the range of
I/O OPs available to animators, including
MIDI
MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and ...
devices, raw files or
TCP connections, audio devices (including built-in
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
and
pitch detection),
mouse cursor position, and so on. Of particular note is Houdini's ability to work with audio, including sound and music synthesis and spatial 3D sound processing tools. These operators exist in the context called "CHOPs" for which Side Effects won a Technical Achievement Academy Award in 2002.
VEX (Vector Expression) is one of Houdini's internal languages. It is similar to the
Renderman Shading Language Renderman Shading Language (abbreviated RSL) is a component of the RenderMan Interface Specification, and is used to define shaders. The language syntax is C-like.
A shader written in RSL can be used without changes on any RenderMan-compliant ren ...
. Using VEX a user can develop custom SOPs, POPs, shaders, etc. The current implementation of VEX utilizes
SIMD-style processing.
Rendering
Houdini is bundled with a production-class renderer, Mantra, which had many similarities to
RenderMan in its scope and application in its initial incarnation. Micropolygon rendering is supported, allowing high-quality displacement operations as well as traditional scan-line and raytracing modes. Shaders are scriptable and composed in their VEX language, or by using VOPs; their node-based interface to programming VEX. Mantra (as does Houdini itself) also supports point-clouds, which can be similar in application as brickmaps in Renderman. This allows more complicated light interactions, such as sub-surface scattering and ambient occlusion, to be produced with lower computational overhead. Mantra can perform extremely fast
volume rendering, and also physically based
path-tracing
Path tracing is a computer graphics Monte Carlo method of rendering images of three-dimensional scenes such that the global illumination is faithful to reality. Fundamentally, the algorithm is integrating over all the illuminance arriving ...
– a technique which attempts to more accurately model the physical interactions of light and materials.
TouchDesigner
''Derivative Inc.'' is a spin-off of Side Effects Software that markets a derivative of Houdini called
TouchDesigner. Tailored toward real-time
OpenGL-generated animation, it was used on rock group
Rush's 30th-anniversary tour to produce dynamic graphics driven directly by the musicians.
TouchDesigner was also used by Xite Labs (formerly V Squared Labs) to create live visuals for
Amon Tobin
Amon Adonai Santos de Araújo Tobin (born February 7, 1972), known as Amon Tobin (), is a Brazilian electronic musician, composer and producer. He is noted for his unusual methodology in sound design and music production. He has released eight ...
's
ISAM installation tour.
Production
The notable works in which Houdini was used include the 1997 ''
Contact
Contact may refer to:
Interaction Physical interaction
* Contact (geology), a common geological feature
* Contact lens or contact, a lens placed on the eye
* Contact sport, a sport in which players make contact with other players or objects
* C ...
'' movie and more recent 2016 ''
Zootopia
''Zootopia'' (titled ''Zootropolis'' in various regions) is a 2016 American computer-animated buddy cop action comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 55th Disney animated feature fi ...
.
''
See also
References
External links
SideFX Software Makers of Houdini
{{DEFAULTSORT:Houdini (Software)
3D graphics software
IRIX software
1996 software
3D animation software
3D computer graphics software for Linux
Proprietary commercial software for Linux
Motion graphics software for Linux