Houdini (software)

Houdini is a high-end 3D animation package developed by Side Effects Software which is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Its chief distinction from other packages is that it has been designed as a purely procedural environment. A version of the product, called Houdini Apprentice, is available as a free download for non-commercial use.

Features

Houdini covers all the major areas of 3D production, including:

• Modeling - All standard geometry entities including Polygons, (Hierarchical) NURBs/Bézier Curves/Patches & Trims, Metaballs
• Animation - Keyframed animation and raw channel manipulation (CHOPs), motion capture support
• Particles
• Dynamics - Rigid Body Dynamics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Wire (Curve) Dynamics, Cloth Simulation
• Lighting - node-based shader authoring, lighting and re-lighting in an IPR viewer
• Rendering - supporting a variety of renderers; besides Mantra: Renderman, mental ray and various 3rd party support
• Volumetrics - generations/population/manipulation/rendering of scalar- and vectorfields
• Compositing - full compositor of floating-point deep (layered) images
• Plugin Development - development libraries for user extensibility

Houdini is an open-environment and supports a variety of scripting APIs. Python is increasingly the scripting language of choice for the package, and is intended to substitute its original CShell-like scripting language, Hscript. However, any major scripting languages which support socket communication can interface...
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