New sand and crowd tools included in Houdini 4

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New sand and crowd tools included in Houdini 14 --

Tue, 20 Jan 2015 10:11

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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 Position Based Dynamics is a multi physics 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 wire like 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 look at 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 preselection 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

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