Houdini Indie News

Global Game Jam hit its 11th year in 2019 and claimed the title of “Biggest Game Jam Ever” yet again. Teams had just 48 hours to make a game based on the theme of "what home means to you".

SideFX also held its third annual "Game Jam with Houdini Contest", any game that was made with Houdini could enter. This year’s contest received game entries from all over the world, including Brazil, Poland, UK, Ethiopia, France, Kazakhstan, Belgium, USA, Netherlands, and India. All of the entries were played by a panel of game industry pros and judged on the categories of art & aesthetics, sounds & music, gameplay & fun factor, and use of the game jam theme. After some difficult deliberation, the judges decided on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners.

Winning teams received a variety of game dev prizes including Quixel Megascans assets, MIX Training tutorials, discounts on Rebelway courses, Unreal Engine swag packs, Pluralsight subscriptions, and Houdini Indie Steam Keys.


You can view, download, and play the winning games here:
https://www.sidefx.com/community/game-jam-contest-winners/

SideFX is proud to announce the release of Houdini 17.5. Whether you are a feature film VFX artist, a game developer or a small studio, Houdini 17.5 brings you new and enhanced tools to meet your most demanding production requirements.

Houdini 17.5 is an important release that includes:

- NEW: Task Operator Network (TOPs)

- Built with new Procedural Dependency Graph [PDG] technology
- Automate and scale pipeline tasks, including FX pipelines
- Describe and visualize dependencies to maximize compute efficiency
- Distribute tasks intelligently using Local, HQueue, Deadline, or Tractor Schedulers
- Nested wedging support to create many variants of data, such as models, simulations and more
- Convenient shelf tools for typical wedging operations
- Process Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs) in parallel
- Create large scale procedural environments by chaining a system with HDAs
- Bring unparalleled scale to Houdini Engine through the API extension for PDG
- Automate applications such as Houdini and Maya using command chains
- Higher level support for Mantra, Geo, and Alembic ROPs, with other ROPs also supported through the ROP Fetch node
- Script, manage, and schedule work items using Python
- Rich set of stock nodes to enhance pipeline functionality

• Data import and export using CSV, SQL, JSON, and XML nodes
  
• Interface with Shotgun to bring in and manage assets
  
• Create image mosaics using ImageMagick
  
• Assemble frames into movies using ffmpeg
  
• Integrate with asset management systems such as Perforce
  

- Communicate pipeline events to your team using the Send Email TOP
- Standalone PilotPDG app for working exclusively with TOP networks

- Fluids

- Distributable FLIP narrow band and whitewater simulations
- Highly accurate collision handling in FLIP pressure projection
- Realtime path-traced Pyro visualization in the viewport
- POP Fluid shelf tool for condensation

- Vellum

- Per-point cloth friction attribute
- Multi-dimensional tetrahedral fibre constraints
- Stiffness drop-off control
- Streamlined generation of tetrahedral soft bodies
- Stress visualization of all soft body types

- RBD/Destruction

- Massive speed gains and memory boost for rigid bodies with instanced geometry
- Viewport-centric workflow for constraint setup and editing
- Dedicated RBD Constraint SOPs
- Time Scale parameter in Bullet solver
- RBD Material Fracture 2.0: better edge detail handling for concrete destruction
- Open surface support in Boolean Fracture SOP

- Viewport

- Realtime path-traced display of all volume types, with self-shadowing
- Shader parity with Mantra's Principled shader and other software packages
- High quality lighting improvements, including 3x frame rate for area lights
- Object level Python support for interactive workflows
- Browser/inspector panel for custom Python states
- Better heuristics for near and far clipping planes
- Better compositing of viewport passes for color correction with OpenColorIO and LUTs
- Homing along construction plane normal

- Modeling / Geometry

- Ability to display and inspect the geometry of all outputs of a SOP
- Fully redesigned Fuse SOP with new snapping and fusion capabilities
- Powerful shape analysis and visualization via Measure SOP 2.0
- Many feature and performance enhancements to BlendShapes SOP
- Faster and feature-rich Exploded View SOP
- Scatter SOP can now read density texture directly from COPs
- Bound SOP computation of axis-aligned or freely-oriented bounding rectangle
- More compiled SOPs such as File, Volume, and Cloud Light
- Rotations in multiples of 90 degrees now handled with exact precision
- Interactive selection by pattern or surface normal
- Squash and stretch manipulator for non-uniform scaling
- Construction planes in the orthographic viewport

- Terrain

- 70% less memory required for erosion
- Freeform alpha cutouts with optional cropping
- Enhancements to landscape I/O

- GameDev

- Blended linear and dual quaternion skinning for FBX I/O
- AliceVision photogrammetry support
- Dedicated hard surface shader for game developers
- MikkT support in PolyFrame SOP
- GLTF importer enhancements
- UV Attribute Transfer SOP
- Path deformer
- Building generator
- Spiral generator
- Enhanced texture baker
- Many other improvements to existing toolset

- Rendering

- 4x faster photon map acceleration structure
- Simplified shader binding of texture coordinates
- Light path expressions store unshadowed lighting contributions

There are many more new features in the new release. Please refer to the What's New section in the Houdini 17.5 documentation for a more complete feature list: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini17.5/news/17_5/index.html

Houdini Indie on Steam has been updated to version 17.0.506.


You can view the changelog here.


You can access Houdini Indie production builds and daily builds on Steam by right clicking on Houdini Indie in your Steam library, selecting "Properties", selecting "Betas" tab, and then choosing Houdini 17 daily builds or production builds from the betas list.

SideFX will be hosting the 3rd annual "Game Jam with Houdini Contest" that will run alongside Global Game Jam.

Any Global Game Jam team that uses Houdini to make their game is eligible to enter. The contest is sponsored with game dev prizes from Quixel, Rebelway, MIX Training, Pluralsight, and SideFX.

Details here:
https://www.sidefx.com/community/global-game-jam-houdini-contest-2019/

Houdini Indie on Steam has been updated to version 17.0.459.


You can view the changelog here.


You can access Houdini Indie production builds and daily builds on Steam by right clicking on Houdini Indie in your Steam library, selecting "Properties", selecting "Betas" tab, and then choosing Houdini 17 daily builds or production builds from the betas list.