1st March 2012

Houdini 12 Now Available

side effects software3D animation and visual effects software developer Side Effects Software has announced the release of Houdini 12 with a wealth of new features and performance enhancements that make it easier for CG artists to accomplish more and iterate faster. 

“My first two weeks of using Houdini 12 in production, I couldn’t stop smiling!” said Szymon Kapeniak, CG Supervisor, Human Ark about the new version. “Everything is so much faster and easier, yet on the surface it’s still the same Houdini.”

The performance enhancements in Houdini 12 are already having an impact on how Houdini artists work. During beta testing, many studios opted to put the new version into production. The significantly faster simulation times were particularly popular, especially when using the GPU to run fire and smoke simulations using OpenCL.

Built on a powerful new geometry engine, Houdini 12 includes targeted optimizations to dynamics and rendering and a reworked OpenGL 3 viewport. Houdini 12 also includes Bullet solver integration, Pyro FX 2, faster, more accurate FLIP fluids, production-ready cloth, an Alembic exporter and much more.

Houdini’s Mantra renderer, recently recognized with a Scientific and Technical Achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, now brings physically-based rendering to volumes such as smoke and fire. Mantra also includes a 300 times speed improvement when instancing to points.

“Houdini has refined the dynamics framework and crystallized the smoke/pyro simulation pipeline to make for a very robust and phenomenally fast workflow to create multithreaded and GPU-assisted grid-based volume simulations and rendering. The speed gains going from Houdini 11 to Houdini 12 are beyond an order of magnitude in this respect,” says Theodor Vandernoot , Sony Pictures Imageworks. “The ease of training FX artists using Houdini 12 for volume simulations is now straightforward, and the feedback and iteration time makes for an enjoyable workflow for volume rendering.”

Houdini 12 can be downloaded from sidefx.com immediately with Houdini Escape available for as low as $1,995 and Houdini Master available for as low as $6,695. The free Apprentice Edition can also be downloaded today and Houdini Apprentice HD is available for an annual fee of $99.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2012 at 10:03 am and is filed under CGFX, National News, New Releases, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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