Houdini is a flexible 3D animation software package that is famous for its high-quality graphics pipeline. It is fully capable of modeling, texturing, rigging and animating 3D models. You can create entire worlds of 3D content, or you can fuse your 3D creations into real-world footage. It is often included in large-scale cinematic projects that require contributions from multiple applications because it is an ideal tool to draw all these elements together into one place. Houdini is also highly extensible, and famous movie production companies are drawn to this flexibility. It offers the creative latitude to do whatever you can imagine.
In addition to the garden-variety styles of modeling, this 3D animation software is well known for building highly complex gas volumes such as clouds. Visible gasses traditionally require intense calculations because of the vast amounts of particle data required for accurate rendition. Houdini's cloud-related features are so much better than the norm that many major production studios have included Houdini in their toolsets for this reason alone.
Houdini comes with a powerful rendering engine known as Mantra. It is capable of photorealistic renditions and supports ray tracing – an essential feature for global illumination. Houdini's GI algorithm produces beautiful, photorealistic lighting. Mantra's GI algorithm supports subsurface scattering and ambient occlusion for the most realistic images possible. These types of renders require a lot of computation time, so do not expect Houdini to spit them out very quickly.
Although it is certainly a professional-grade animator, Houdini's feature list is less impressive when it comes to animation than many competing software packages. It doesn't have the add-ons that might have made it more appealing, such as time warping or stereoscopic rendering. You can still expect the basics, however. It supports scripted, procedural and keyframe animation with layers.
Houdini is procedural and works with nodes, which makes for easy (but precise) modeling and sophisticated texturing and animation. Nodes allow you to build a graph to control the flow of data when applying special features and affects to your models, and it has the advantage of being visual. You can easily see how each node relates to the others and what the result is on your model. You can even construct geometric models this way.
As if that was not enough, nodes also allow you integrate and apply plugins that you have scripted or downloaded. This node-based interface makes Houdini highly extensible and customizable. If you want it to do something Houdini cannot do directly out of the box, the procedural, node-based interface makes it easy to integrate your own plugins. This flexibility is one of the reasons that Houdini is so popular with film studios that have their own proprietary software – it blends well with their preexisting assets.
Houdini has decent support online. Side Effects Software provides tutorials and help on the company website, and you can contact them via email in the event of a technical problem. The learning curve can be daunting, so these resources will come in handy to you.
Houdini does a little bit of everything. It has industry-strength modeling, rendering and animating capabilities. Its procedural, nature and node-based interface makes it very good at integrating plugins, and this extensibility has helped it gain popularity. We recommend this product as one of the best 3D animation software packages available on the market today.
