Houdini 18.5

“IT’S CLEARLY NOTICEABLE THAT SOME NEW, USEFUL FEATURES ARE BASED ON HIGH-END PRODUCTION FEEDBACK”

- Greg Barta

PRICE From $269/year (indie) to $6,995 (floating studio licence) |

COMPANY SideFX |

WEBSITE sidefx.com

FEATURES

KineFX: were procedural, hand, and mocap animation blends with simulation

Vellum brush (see top right box for more info) Pyro revamp: GPU-based interactive mode, complex shelf tools

Enhanced and more stable Solaris and PDG modules

Interactive content tools, i.e. live asset link with Unreal Engine

It’s been about two years since I wrote a review on Houdini for 3D World readers (back in issue #241), and a lot has changed since then. We are currently living in a world where artists are stuck within the walls of their homes all day, and digital content has become an increasingly essential intake for many. Thus, it’s a rather responsible task to develop such software as Houdini. Sadly, it seems there is an opposite trend in the software industry, as such companies use enthusiastic users as guinea pigs. It’s cheaper than having an appropriately sized in-house testing and QA team, and also yields more bug reports per time because of the higher user exposure.

To be clear, Houdini is generally better in this regard than many of its competitors, but the last two new major modules were astonishingly buggy at their releases – even after the first few ‘production builds’ I couldn’t recommend them for serious production. Actually, they revived the memories of my Maya years.