Houdini Engine

Elyaradine

Houdini's been kind of a sleeper hit for a while, particularly for doing CG work that involves dynamics and procedural asset creation. (This, I'm told, has become quite popular in studios that have to make giant, sprawling worlds and massive cities, while not blowing their art budget.) You don't have to bake things down and export them to Unity; they're actually live in Unity, doing their thing in real-time. Sounds pretty sweet.

It's free to use right now, as a public preview that's running indefinitely.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2600&Itemid=387

Tuism

The site says it's only available for 32 bit window... Has everyone stayed on 32 bit windows or moved onto 64 bit? I'm about to format and reinstall so was wondering. (next step is a thorough upgrade @_@)

creative630

@Tuism I think most people have moved to 64bit, windows has a 32bit emulator anyway.

I recently saw the Houdini update too. Its been on my radar since the voxel library I'm using, OpenVDB, was integrated into houdini. Some pretty cool artist friendly procedural generation stuff going on there and Unity integration is win :)

TheFuntastic

This looks kinda amazingly awesome. I've seen Houdini listed on the credits of many video productions - had no idea there is a realtime implementation. Great! Another technology I don't have time to learn...

TheFuntastic

So it's 2019 and I've finally been getting to into Houdini. :D

Let's just say it consistently finds way to blow my mind! We're all familiar with Unity and having inspector to tweak and push values. Houdini espouses many of the same concepts, but for 3D! Another way I've described it, as Adobe Illustrator is to Photoshop, Houdini is to other 3D modelling apps. It just a lot more control, precision and variance.

Procedural-ism in built into the core of Houdini, the idea of instead a building a tree, build a tree system, and then you can have a 1000 trees. It's the kind of thinking that's coming to the fore in other tools like substance designer. In this regard Houdini is one of the best node graph editor tools I've used, because it finally realises the dream of being able to put code in any inspector field, or to have in nodes that allow you to put little pieces of code in them.

Whilst the paradigms in Houdini aren't for everyone, some simple 3d operations can be very tedious (Blender 2.8 might be a better tool) - but can confirm it's a tech artists dream :D

(Fun fact: I found this while trying to debug houdini engine integration :D )