Side Effects Software intros Houdini 10

Side Effects Software, of Toronto, Canada, has introduced Houdini 10 for Mac, Windows and Linux. An industry leader in 3D animation and visual effects software, Houdini 10 is now immediately available and will help make visual artists more productive while equipping studios with the most powerful tools in the industry. 

Houdini 10

Houdini 10 is the first commercially available software to slice up and distribute fluid simulations over a network of computers. 3D artists will benefit from faster simulation times and the ability to create super-sized and scaled simulations. 

“The ability to slice up and distribute fluid sims lets studios assign a smaller memory load to each computer in the simulation farm” says Cristin Barghiel, Director of Product Development, Side Effects. “At the same time, they can take advantage of multi-threading on each node to make things run even faster.”

Such simulations can be integrated into existing pipelines or distributed to work with HQueue, a new python-based job manager which can also distribute Mantra renderings. HQueue is initially being released by Side Effects Software for just Linux as a free public beta, but planned releases for for July 2009 will see it come to both Mac OS X and Windows systems. The new HQueue will be a free add-on to Houdini Escape and Houdini Master licensees. 

Also new in Houdini 10 include the new Pyro FX tools that enable smoke and fire effects. A new res-up technology enables users to plan out shots with fire and smoke effects at lower resolutions and then scale up at final render times. A listing of some of the best new features follows:

• Motion FX gives artist-friendly access to procedural channel operators (CHOPS) to enable advanced motion capabilities
• Improved Network Usability
• Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in Houdini’s multi-threaded shading language
• Deep Camera Maps, which makes it possible to render volumes and objects into separate passes then combine them perfectly later
• Rigid Body Solver
• Houdini’s cloth solver – can be used to simulate crumpling and tearing of dentable and elastic surfaces
• Wire solver now supports Parting
• New Knife and Edge Loop modeling tools
• And more…