As an artist and animator, you use your CG tools to bring life to your ideas. Along the way, you make creative decisions that are necessary to achieve your goals. A lot of these decisions involve experimenting and reworking ideas to get them just right. In Houdini, each of these decisions is recorded as a node that is wired up to other nodes. The resulting network provides a blueprint of your creative process and a framework for making revisions.

Work Fast, Smart, Flexible. Easily step back and make changes - even late into the production cycle. You can rewire and modify your node networks any way you desire, making it possible to quickly develop and present multiple interations to your team and ultimately to your client.

A New Level of Understanding. As your creative decisions get saved into Houdini nodes, you build up a wealth of information that is always at your fingertips. Gain low-level access to your scene making it easy to face both day-to-day tasks and technical challenges with confidence.

Take Control of Tools and Assets. Once a solution is in place, you can bundle up your networks into a new node called a Houdini Digital Asset. Encapsulate your favourite workflows into assets then set up an artist-friendly UI for your colleagues. Distribute your custom tools throughout your production and use Houdini’s reliable referencing scheme to keep all the assets up-to-date.

Artist-friendly User Interface

• Use Houdini’s toolshelf to create one or more nodes.
• Navigate to different networks interactively using new selection mask types
• Use tool bar to access tools such as move and rotate
• Context senstive RMB-menus used throughout
• Work with easy to understand node networks to access different parts of your scene
• Make creative decisions using node-specific handles

Network Management

• Create new nodes directly in network view
• Connect and disconnnect nodes using network wires
• Set display flags on any node in a network
• Set bypass flag on a node to turn off its influence
• Set up switch nodes to choose between two or more input nodes.
• Collapse nodes to create nested network inside a subnetwork node
• Organize networks and nodes with network boxes
• Set up network grids to help lay out nodes
• Color nodes to provide visual feedback
• Add comments to nodes to share information with colleagues
• Display network dependencies to see how nodes connect to other nodes at different network levels.

Digital Assets

• Encapsulate nodes into Digital Assets that can be reused or shared with colleagues
• Use Digital Assets to build props, characters, and a wide variety of custom tools
• Reference Digital Assets from Operator Type Library (.otl) files on disk that can be easily updated
• Build high-level controls and handles to make assets easy to use by artists
• Houdini provides a graphical interface to build, modify, add parameters and manage assets
• Tight coupling between Digital Assets and the shelf tools provide a powerful and customizable workflow
• Download toolshelves filled with digital assets from the Houdini Exchange section of the Side Effects website

Takes

• Keep track of creative decisions by storing parameter changes using takes
• Easily switch between takes to review the development of your ideas
• Delete parameters from a take to remove their influence
• Layer takes hierarchically or branch off to explore options
• Merge Takes with other takes to collapse the results
• Set up render output nodes to only rende a specific take