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Unleash your talents with Houdini Apprentice!

Houdini Apprentice is a free version of Houdini FX which can be used by students, artists and hobbyists to create personal non-commercial projects.  With Houdini Apprentice, you have access to virtually all of the features of the award-winning Houdini FX to develop your skills and work on personal projects. Apprentice lets you save to disk and render out with a watermark.


We decided to use Houdini not only because it is used in the industry but also because it provides a powerful,  flexible environment and natural node-based workflow that stretches students’ capabilities.

by Seth Holladay | BYU

License to Learn

Use of Houdini Apprentice is limited to following:
  • Non-commercial projects
  • Houdini Apprentice cannot be used in the same pipeline as commercial versions of Houdini
  • Houdini Digital Assets created in Apprentice can not be used with Houdini Engine or Houdini Engine Indie
  • Houdini Apprentice uses its own file format for saving scenes and assets
  • It is restricted to 1280x720 when rendering
  • Rendering to file formats other than .picnc are wordmarked
  • Houdini Apprentice does not work with third party renderers.
  • Houdini Apprentice uses is a thirty-day license that auto renews therefore an internet connection is needed once a month.

Please refer to the EULA [End User License Agreement] for specific details regarding these restrictions.

Works with Houdini Education

Houdini Apprentice has been designed to let students work at home for free then work with Houdini Education when they get into school. The .hipnc file format works in both of these versions of Houdini to make this workflow easy to manage. While there are some restrictions when working with Houdini at home, those go away when these files are used in a lab setting.

Rendering Options

You can also render to .picnc files in Houdini Apprentice at home then use Houdini Education to convert these to another file format without a wordmark being applied. Or you can bring in your scene files and render them directly using Houdini Education at a higher resolution and without a watermark.