SideFX  FEATURES

Physical Simulation & VFX

PYRO FX
Fire & Smoke
With Pyro FX , Fire and Smoke simulations look more realistic and are faster and easier to set up. The speed gains in Houdini are significant allowing for more iterations. The ability to simulate using the GPU takes things to a whole new level and advances in volume rendering create an impressive final look.

FLUIDS
Water & Liquids
Create realistic sims using forces such as surface tension, viscosity, and visco-elasticity. Particle fluids can be surfaced at the geometry level to produce high quality splashes while fluild forces are used to create white water effects.

PARTICLE
Dynamics
Whether you are creating dust and debris or a flocks of birds, the particle tools in Houdini let you define a clear set of rules using a simple node network made up of sources, forces, attractors and collision objects.

DESTRUCTION FX
Bullet Rigid Body Dynamics
In Houdini FX, you can use the Bullet Rigid Body solver to create highly complex simulations of large data sets. This solver and Houdini’s own solver work with various forces, constraints and collisions for complete control.

FINITE ELEMENTS
Solids
The Finite Element solver analyzes the stresses on an object then either bends or breaks it. FEM can also be used for soft body effects with volume preservation. This solver takes the simulation of digital destruction, and gooey slimy objects, to the next level.

VELLUM
Fast Cloth & Hair
New VELLUM multi-solver brings FAST cloth to Houdini along with other integrated effects such as hair, soft bodies and grains. The Vellum solver is GPU-accelerated and very easy to set up and iterate.

GRAINS
Sand & Snow
Position-Based Dynamics is a multi-physics environment ideally suited to the creation of wet and dry sand. The VELLUM and PBD solvers 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.

CROWDS
With Rag doll Dynamics
The crowd tools use artist-friendly shelf tools along with packed agent primitives, a Finite State Machine solver, hardware accelerated display of instanced crowds, controls for crowd layout, rag doll dynamics, steering, collision avoidance, terrain adaptation, motion blending, and look-at targets.