Houdini 10 is currently being beta tested and is proving to be one of the coolest releases yet. This version is packed with a wealth of new features and usability changes designed to make you more productive in your day-to-day work. As we approach number 10, I wanted to talk about our development process and the steps we take as we approach a new release.

At the end of the article, I have posted a few "sneak peek" videos showing work in progress shots created by developers and production specialists while we were working on the code.

A Great Team of Developers

People often ask me how we create such amazing software with such a modestly-sized team of developers. Well, we start by gathering together programmers and mathematicians with a great blend of skills and experience. We have a pretty seasoned bunch, with the longest serving developer being Mark Elendt who has been coding for over 19 years! Mark works primarily on Mantra, but is responsible for numerous other innovations. One of our newest developers is Oleg Samus, who has already proven himself by leading our FBX implementation. He has been very busy with Houdini 10, and it is hard to believe he has only been here a year and a half.

There are too many people on the team to list them all, but rest assured they all bring amazing talent to the table. And our developers do more than just write code for the next release. The whole development team gets involved with our customers by helping out with support, making site visits or providing custom services.

The development team is led by Paul Salvini and Cristin Barghiel. Paul, as CTO, looks at new technologies, such as multi-core CPUs, and then helps us chart a path where Houdini can take full advantage of them. Cristin is our Director of Product Development and he manages the team and consults with customers to get input into what is important. These ideas are then incorporated into the Houdini planning process. Thanks to the synergy between everyone on our team, we always put out rich and relevant releases that help our customers create great digital art.

Our Development Cycle

Collecting input from customers and developing new features is an ongoing process, but after a major release we go through a larger group product planning process. In addition to customer feedback, valuable input comes from our support team, testing, and sales. One advantage of our smaller size is that every person has direct access to every other person in the company; these direct and casual interactions help create a natural balancing of development priorities.

Once all of the new ideas are in place, Cristin and Paul lay out a 2-year Houdini road-map. This includes revisions to ideas from the prior 2-year plan and new ideas for the future. We find two years represent a nice time frame: short enough to be able to adapt and take into account new technologies and production techniques that we know will come (without always knowing what they may be); and long enough to accomplish bigger architectural changes or feature enhancements that cannot practically get done within one year.

For instance, while working on Houdini 10's productivity enhancements, we have a team of developers digging deep into Houdini to work on significantly improving performance including leveraging multi-core architectures. These changes are big and in a future release will make a huge difference when interacting in the viewport and performing multi-threaded tasks such as rendering or simulating heavy fluids.

Daily Builds make a Difference

Unique to Side Effects is the use of daily builds in our development cycle. While we generally put out a major release each year, we offer daily builds to our users once we go gold. This means that daily bug fixes and enhancements are available to all current customers. For instance, Houdini 9.5 is now at build 403 which indicates 403 days of development. Users who came to our download page would see this build as well as prior builds such as 9.5 build 379. A Version log accompanies each daily build to let everyone know what enhancements to expect on any particular day.

On a recent survey published by CGenie.com, Houdini scored the highest when readers responded to the question, “I feel the frequency of upgrades/new versions is about right.” The editor added, “It was interesting to observe that Houdini users found this a difficult question to understand as the SideFX team have brought their users so close to the software development cycle.”

Whether it is tomorrow’s software build or a Houdini release two years from now, bringing users closer to the software development cycle is very important to us. Over the years, we’ve consistently refined our approach to achieving this essential synergy.

Houdini 10 Sneak Peek

The planned release of Houdini 10 is in April and all of its features will get announced to the community at that time. To give you a sneak peek we have posted a few videos showing development tests created with Houdini 10. We hope you enjoy these and we can't wait to show you all of the great features once we go gold.

This video shows how the new fire and smoke tools use a powerful up-resing technique.
On the left side is a low-res simulation which defines the basic look of your smoke, then on the right
is an up-resed version which gets added to the existing sim.

This video shows the new fire and smoke tools being used
to collide a simple smoke sim with a primitive object. You can see new types
of noise being implemented in the final sim.

This simulation shows both fire and smoke as defined by
a new shader being developed especially for these new tools.

This video shows a developer's test showing our cloth solver simulating
plastic deformation by crumpling up objects on impact.

This video shows a piece of geometry being cut dynamically with another object.
Tearing of geometry can also be controlled by painting "weak" areas" onto the surface.

Kim Davidson
President and CEO
Side Effects Software