Houdini 14

Houdini 14 is out! Well it's been out but I wanted to talk about some of the interesting features that caught my eye.

One really nice thing was the improved user experience. With speed improvement made to the animation editor, you can see performances much faster which is nice for rig playback. UV Flatten and layout tools now have UDIM support! Massive win if you're working with high fidelity assets in the hopes of optimizing for games.

Other great features include their new position-based dynamics which can run on the CPU or GPU using OpenCL. Pretty nice in case you need to switch from individual tests to pushing simulations over a farm. Their crowd system is now more user friendly and robust in Houdini 14. Their hair grooming feature is now based on OpenVDB and include a new Stroke SOP which I'll need to play with. The results seem pretty promising too!

All in all, these are some pretty nice improvements to an already powerful tool. It's definitely worth a look over.

Hit the jump for some links and a video demo of Houdini 14...

Here's a more comprehensive overview of all the new updates with Houdini 14:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3044&Itemid=417