Side Effects Software, an industry leader in 3D animation and visual effects software, is proud to announce the immediate release of Houdini 14. With a new Position-Based Dynamics solver for granular simulation, new crowd pipeline tools, user interface enhancements and grooming tools for hair and fur, this release brings a better user experience, improved scalability and optimized performance to VFX artists, animators and game makers.
The new Position-Based Dynamics is a multi-physics environment ideally suited to the creation of wet and dry sand. Multi-threaded thanks to its exclusive reliance on VEX-based operators, the new solver 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.
The new crowd system uses artist-friendly shelf tools along with a new packed agent primitive type, a Finite State Machine solver and hardware accelerated display of instanced crowds. The system has a seamless conduit to Houdini’s Mantra renderer 
and is equipped with controls for crowd layout, steering, collision avoidance, terrain adaptation, motion blending, and look-at targets.
This crowd pipeline is intended primarily for large, mid-to-background, non-interacting crowds executing basic motions and can seamlessly interact with dynamic elements such as Bullet, fluids and sand. This pipeline will be enhanced in future releases to support more complex agent interactions and AI for creating hero quality crowds. |
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