Houdini Anonymous Usage Statistics

By participating in the Houdini Anonymous Usage Statistics program, you help Side Effects Software improve future versions of our product to give you the best experience possible. By analyzing patterns in how Houdini is used in the real world, we can make decisions that have the biggest impact on making Houdini a better product.

Houdini includes functionality to send to Side Effects Software anonymous usage, performance, and responsiveness statistics about user interface features, memory, and hardware configuration.

You can disable this functionality in Houdini by selecting Edit > Preferences > Miscellaneous and unchecking Send Anonymous Usage Statistics or by setting the environment variable HOUDINI_ANONYMOUS_STATISTICS to 0.

The only two pieces of potentially personal information sent to Side Effects Software are:

1. IP address, since it is sent when you make any connection with the internet
2. An anonymized hardware identifier, so we can tell when the same user uses the product more than once

We take your privacy very seriously, and do not collect personal information about you. You can refer to our 
Privacy Policy for more information.

Examples of data collected include:

• Houdini crash information
• Software and hardware configurations, such as:
1. Operating system
2. Graphic card information
3. System memory
4. Screen resolution
5. Number of processors
• Name of the product used (for example, Houdini FX, base Houdini, Houdini Batch, Mantra, Houdini Apprentice HD, Houdini Apprentice)
• Houdini’s major and minor version as well as build number
• Total time of product use
• Usage information for different Houdini node types

These data would help Side Effects Software determine:

• Where to fix Houdini to remove bugs
• Which video cards to support
• The range of platforms and operating systems to support
• How to prioritize development
• How often different product features are used