Houdini 18.5
| | PRICE From $269/year (indie) to $6,995 (floating studio licence) COMPANY Sidefx WEBSITE sidefx.com
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 home all day, and digital content has become an increasingly essential intake for many. Thus, it’s a rather responsible task developing such software as Houdini. Sadly, it seems there is an opposite trend in the software industry, as such companies use the 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.
PDG (TOP nodes –Task Operators), the first such toolset, arrived in Houdini 17.5. It’s a node-based automation system, we can call it proceduralism squared. There is some excuse for the issues during its initial months, because it seems that Pythonbased things – like this module – simply inherit the chaotic nature of this programming language. Indeed, when Houdini devs received the Sci-tech Oscar in 2018, they even made a joke of it, publicly asking the creator of Python to fix it.
With version 18 they launched Solaris (LOP nodes – lookdev, layout and lighting operators), an implementation of the now industry-standard node-based scene assembly, lighting and rendering environment. It brings Houdini into the ring where Katana, Gaffer, Guerilla Render and Clarisse Builder are.
In the actual 18.5 release these two modules are much more matured and stable. It’s clearly noticeable that some new, useful features are based on high-end production feedback. However Karma, the renderer tailored for Solaris, is still sluggish, and lacks a few important features of the original one, Mantra. Sidefx is somewhat honest and left the beta flag on it – however I’d rather use alpha or experimental.
There are around half a dozen third-party alternatives,
“IT’S CLEARLY NOTICEABLE THAT SOME NEW, USEFUL FEATURES ARE BASED ON HIGH-END PRODUCTION FEEDBACK”
and some feel more integrated than the native offering. For example 3Delight, known for its reliability, which is free for your first 12 CPU cores (even for commercial work, without other limits). Then there’s also Renderman (which is free for non-commercial work), and the fast Gpu-based alternatives like Redshift and Octane.
The very new module in this release is Kinefx. In recent years the team at Sidefx emphasised that originally their aim was to make the most versatile procedural animation package. Animation is where Maya was always the flagship, however most of the VFX and animation studios develop their own bespoke modules to mix hand and mocap animation with simulation, from rigs to tissues. Kinefx in Houdini promises such opportunities for people who can only work with off-the-shelf software, especially smaller studios and indies. This is the first iteration of it, still we get dozens of useful nodes in the SOPS (Surface Operators) context, without the need for the oldfashioned CHOPS (Channel Operators) for rigging. Indeed, inside some of these nodes we can build complex rig solvers with the familiar VOP nodes, in addition to the new and dedicated ones for Kinefx. It feels like a partial reincarnation of Fabric Engine Canvas.
The updated Pyro toolset is also very impressive, however it feels like a step towards a reality where the stereotypical moviegoer’s vision of VFX, just pushing buttons, becomes true. Some of these premade high-level tools and assets – shelf tools, examples in the help and downloadable content on their website – are basically ready for final render. Well, Sidefx hire big studio TDS for such work.
There are some less striking but rather useful new features like the attribute adjust nodes and the scattering-related options as well. These make proper mass-instancing more straightforward and ergonomic, as we really don’t need an overcomplicated node setup as before.
I should also mention the optional Sidefx Labs toolset – formerly Game (Dev) Tools – which now ships with the official Houdini installer. I really recommend it as it feels like the small but skillful developer team are your TDS, serving up many useful tools for tasks where Houdini feels a bit raw. Mostly higher-level nodes wrapped around the native ones, but also bridges for some third-party tools (photogrammetry, game development, and so on).
The UI received some essential updates in the past few releases, for example we finally have similar fidelity and customisation possibilities with radial menus as with the marking menus in Maya since its early releases. However I think it’s time for a full UI revamp, and Blender could be a great idea resource for this too, especially for better customisation.
I removed one star to reflect the glitches of the past three releases, but hopefully Sidefx will avoid being addicted to new marketing-driven features – what some of their competitors do – and focus on polishing the existing ones. Because feature-wise, Houdini is already beyond five stars.