Side Effects Software, which develops 3D animation and visual effects software, has
announced the release of Houdini 14. With a new Position-Based Dynamics solver
for granular simulation, new crowd pipeline tools, UI enhancements and grooming
tools for hair and fur, this release brings a better user experience, improved
scalability and optimised performance to VFX artists, animators and game makers.
The new PositionBased Dynamics is a multiphysics environment ideally suited to the
creation of wet and dry sand. Multi-threaded thanks to its exclusive reliance on VEX-
based operators, the new solver can run on the CPU or on the GPU using OpenCL. In
addition to sand effects, artists can create solids, sheets or tethers to generate soft
body, cloth and wirelike simulations.
The new crowd system uses artist friendly shelf tools along with a new packed agent
primitive type, a Finite State Machine solver and hardware accelerated display of
instanced crowds. The system has a seamless conduit to Houdini’s Mantra renderer
and is equipped with controls for crowd layout, steering, collision avoidance, terrain
adaptation, motion blending, and lookat targets.
This crowd pipeline is intended primarily for large, mid-to-background, non-interacting crowds executing basic motions, and can seamlessly interact with
dynamic elements such as Bullet, fluids and sand. It will be enhanced in future
releases to support more complex agent interactions and AI for creating hero-quality crowds.
With Houdini 14, a great deal of work has gone into user experience. From
pre-selection highlighting to new handles, improved edge loop selection, new UV
Flatten and UV Layout tools with UDIM support, grooming tools for hair and fur, an
advanced visualiser architecture, custom panels and much more, this release will
make it easier for artists to work procedurally.
Meanwhile, animators will appreciate the new faster Animation editor with
Animation layers and significant speed improvements to the display and playback of
rigs.
Watch the Houdini 14 product video
