Houdini

This might come as a surprise to some of you: most features in the Houdini plugin are already working and a closed-alpha release is imminent! smile

Given that this is a brand-new plugin, we’re expecting to discover all sorts of issues at first - including stability and performance ones. And, probably, a good amount of missing features, too. Our plan is to share the plugin with a few studios at first and, once stability improves, open access to more people. Once we’re ready to do that, we’ll post in “Dev announcements”.

Regarding what’s working: well, nearly everything! smile
+ Polygons, strands (hair), instances, particles work
+ Transformation/deformation blur works
+ Houdini cameras are translated, Redshift camera shaders and types supported
+ Per object attributes/tessellation/matte/objectID/etc
+ Proxies, proxy instances are supported
+ All possible per-vertex or per-instance/per-particle attributes are supported
+ Global environment shading and volumetric scattering work
+ IPR work
+ AOVs work
+ MPlay can show AOVs
+ A good set of default Houdini lights are translated
+ Redshift lights are there
+ Redshift shaders are there. We’re thinking of which Mantra shaders to convert - if any.
… and tons of other things I’m sure I’m missing

Things recently added in Redshift so they haven’t made it to the plugin yet:
- Baking

Features still being worked in Redshift on so they haven’t made it to the plugin yet:
- OpenVDB/volumetrics
- Optimized particles

Verdict:
Houdini is a beast of a 3d app so we’re pretty sure more work will be needed to iron out any kinks and support the multiple possible workflows. But we feel we’re off to a pretty good start!