SideFx Houdini FX 16.0.504.20 [En]

User Experience
New Node Network and Radial Menus
For a fast and fluid experience, the new network editor has been redesigned from scratch to include custom node shapes, alignment and layout tools, ‘dot’ nodes and much more. New context-sensitive and fully customizable radial menus provide quick access to common tools, making Houdini more accessible for artists.

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Modeling
Artist-Friendly Tools and Procedural Techniques
The modeling toolset in Houdini continues to grow – with new Boolean tools, Smooth and PolyFill. These tools make it easier to create good surface topology for use in Film, TV, Games and VR, and can be used interactively in the viewport or procedurally in the network editor.

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Terrain Generation
Full Artistic Control using Volume Slices and Height Fields
Houdini 16’s terrain system lets you layer and edit terrain easily with tools such as procedural noise, or paint or mask out areas directly. The operations are very similar to image compositing, so terrain artists will find the Houdini workflow familiar. The terrain can then collide with Fluid simulations, Crowd agents, Particles, RBD/destruction and Pyro FX – without converting the heightfields into geometry.

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Look Development
Streamlined Shader Building Workflow
More and more, artists are turning to Houdini’s Mantra to render shots. Houdini 16 includes a new shader building workflow that allows for layer mixing and quick access to procedural texturing tools. Mantra has been enhanced with improved BSDFs for creating Sub-Surface Scattering, Dielectrics, Absorption and more. Game artists can leverage an improved texture baking workflow.

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Character Animation & Rigging
Advanced Rigging Tools with Muscles
Houdini’s animation and rigging tools have been improving over the last few releases – and with the Auto-rigging, Muscle and Flesh architecture and Invisible rigs in Houdini 16, a complete character workflow is now in place. The new Biharmonic skin capturing will save riggers valuable time while the FEM-based muscles produces high-realism results.

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Hair & Grooming
Designed for Unlimited Control
The new hair and fur tools let you easily layer and blend attributes while mixing things like frizz, clumping, bending, parting and curling. Trim or extend hair using 3D brushes; employ masks to isolate areas of interest; paint any hair attribute in an interactive yet procedurally-safe manner. There is nothing black-boxed about the new system, and the artistic freedom it affords is endless.

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Ocean Tools
New Infinite Ocean Architecture
The ability to layer wave spectra using point instanting lets artists create complex, realistic and seamless oceans with elegance and ease. No more tiling artefacts with Houdini 16’s truly infinite oceans. Art directability is paramount and individually modelled and animated hero waves now mix perfectly with existing spectra.

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FLIP Fluids
Art Directable Fluid Simulations
Enhancements to FLIP Fluids include physically-correct surface tension for classic water-crowning shots. Art-directable ‘fluid suction’ uses objects – even deforming objects – to guide the fluid in a controllable fashion that enhances the aesthetic of the fluid dynamics. White water in Houdini 16 is all 3D particle-based which gives much richer, more natural results. For anything viscous, there is a new slip function which provides control over how the fluid interacts with the collision geometry.

New Network Editor
- Brand new architecture for better performance, user experience and control
- Completely redesigned look and feel
- ‘Dot’ connections to help route wires
- Customizable node shapes
- Resizeable colour palette
- ‘Flyout ring’ to quickly access node flags and node info at any zoom level
- Persistent node info dialog with live links and cut-and-paste capabilities
- Visual ‘badges’ to indicate certain properties of the node
- Multi-selectable and multi-assignable wires
- Ability to knife-cut wire connections
- Snapping guides for fast and easy node alignment
- Automatic shifting of nodes to accommodate new entrants
- Intuitive, gesture-driven network layout tools
- Quickmark hotkeys to jump between networks or within one network
- Dimming of long wires to prevent obstruction of nodes
- Visual indication of non-local dependencies, with handy jump-to controls
- Background image support for network boxes or the entire canvas
- Font size, colour and background controls for sticky notes
- Optional display of the node type
- Powerful search engine

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Modeling
- Fast Boolean with exact predicates and arithmetic
- 3D and UV smoothing with advanced surface analysis kernels
- PolyFill with quads, fans, and more
- Enhanced PolySplit and PolyBevel
- Redesigned Copy/Instance and Group
- Intersection analysis and stitching
- Robust 2D triangulation
- Selection enhancements
- Fast tool access via customizable, gestural radial menus
- Infinite reference plane with rulers
- Medial axis snapping
- Vertex normal support in the viewport for cusping
- Pseudo-bevelling with Normal SOP
- Aggressive geometry compression
- Extensive OpenCL support
- ‘Compiled SOP’ architecture: parallel cooking and memory savings
- 3D Mouse support

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Terrain
- Brand new architecture for procedural terrain generation
- Based on height-field volumes in SOPs
- Full and immediate access to Houdini’s modelling arsenal
- 30+ dedicated surface operators
- Powerful erosion models
- Straightforward workflow, similar to image compositing but in 3D
- Seamless optional leveraging of Houdini’s compositing network (COPs)
- Ability to mask areas of interest with freeform curves and texture maps
- Ability to paint and override any attribute
- Support for geotiff and several Lidar formats
- Native output to game engines
- Fully tileable
- Game-friendly terrain material and specialized shader for VFX use
- High-quality visualization in the viewport
- Dedicated Mantra procedural for rendering
- Very fast: hardware accelerated via OpenCL
- Native collision support for Houdini’s physical sim environment (DOPs)

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Look Development
- Architecture for single-tiered shader creation in VOPs (no SHOPs required)
- Much streamlined workflow to aid both new and existing users
- Full support for nested, unlimited shader layering
- Redesigned VOP node tiles
- Ray-traced SSS BSDF with image-plane outputs
- Support for unified nested dielectrics
- Dispersion and absorption BSDFs
- Redesigned Principled ubershader with extensive features and controls
- Updated shader gallery with new entries such as skin, wax and mountain
- Easy OpenGL tagging of shader attributes for viewport visualization
- Viewport support for metallics, coat, occlusion, reflection and more
- Texture baking enhancements
- OpenColor IO support
- Per-pixel inspection of material stylesheet overrides in IPR
- Significant performance enhancements to Mantra
- Fine-grained, intuitive controls for the quality/performance tradeoff
- Direct rendering of HIP files containing curves and points with no Engine license

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Character
- Many enhancements to the Animation Editor
- Flexible constraint architecture based on VOPs and CHOPs
- Biped and quadruped auto-rigs
- Biharmonic skin capturing to diminish the need for weight painting
- Fast bone placement with medial axis support
- ‘Invisible rig’ support in Pose tool
- Spring-based and FEM-based skin & muscle system
- Significantly improved FEM soft-body solver
- Optimized for performance

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Hair & Fur
- Complete overhaul of hair and fur creation, grooming and rendering
- Unrestricted layering of grooming operations in SOPs
- Rich set of dedicated tools such as clump, frizz, curl, trim, extend and part
- Flexible masking tools to isolate areas of interest
- Ability to override any attribute via texture maps or 3D paint
- Total freedom to mix attribute painting with 3D brushing
- Equal editing access to grooming guides and generated hair
- Full preservation of procedural graph
- Built-in simulation controls
- Easy and accurate retargeting
- High-quality hair visualization in the viewport
- Dedicated shelf tools and desktop
- Very fast: uses OpenCL and the new ‘Compiled SOPs’ architecture
- SOP-based Mantra procedural that does not consume Engine license

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Crowd Simulations
- Viewport visualization of material stylesheet overrides
- Animation clip layering
- Enhanced hip adjustment and foot locking
- Non-bipedal terrain adaptation
- Intelligent adaptation to real-time deforming terrain
- Advanced controls for looping, trimming and self-blending of clips
- Easy attachment of props such as weapons and clothing
- Support for custom collision shapes
- Robust and significantly faster computation of automatic joint limits
- Improved clip selection and randomization controls
- Clip renaming and unit conversion during FBX import
- Native support for collision with height-field terrain

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Ocean Tools
- Complete overhaul of the ocean FX architecture
- Unlimited layering of arbitrary wave spectra in SOPs
- Infinite oceans: tile-free approach that eliminates concern for artefacts
- Waves can be applied artefact-free even to deformed/warped base grids
- Art-directable, animated hero waves can be mixed in seamlessly
- Masking tools to isolate areas of interest
- 3D particle foam system for a richer and more realistic look
- Guided sims: seamless blending of FLIP fluid sim with ocean surface
- Improved boundary layer that preserves boundary velocities
- Very fast: OpenCL accelerated
- Layerable ocean shader that lets you plug in foam particles
- Render-time evaluation of ocean surface via dedicated Mantra procedural

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FLIP Fluids
- Physically correct simulation of surface tension
- Suction force: art-directable fluids driven by animated geometry
- Waterline feature: wave dynamics that extends correctly beyond boundaries
- Enhanced viscosity solver with slip controls
- Fully OpenCL-accelerated pyro pipeline
- Native support for collision with height-field terrains

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Houdini Engine & Games
- HAPI 3.0: no longer Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) centric; packed primitive support
- Remote debugger: live view and manipulation of game engine scene within Houdini
- Many UE4 and Unity plug-in enhancements
- Dedicated shelf tools for games
- Rigid-body and breakable simulation export to FBX
- Blendshape export to FBX
- Simulation export to textures for use in real-time engines
- Much improved texture baking
- More robust PolyExpand2D