Side Effects releases Houdini 6.1 - Post News - animation software

Post, Jan, 2004 by Marc Loftus

SANTA MONICA--In an effort to bring increased productivity to animators, as well as technical directors, Side Effects Software has released Version 6.1 of the company's Houdini 3D software. Houdini 6.1 offers artists and effects studios a variety of production-ready new features, including the ability to create, publish and use digital assets within and across projects with greater control, seamlessness and speed. The new software, available now via download from the company's Web site (www.sidefx.com), also features enhanced character animation tools, global illumination rendering, interactive light and camera controls, and an embedded help browser.

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Since Version 6, studios have been implementing Houdini digital assets to economize their workflows by creating characters and effects that can be set up, updated and easily managed throughout a production. Houdini 6.1 adds faster ways to assign the parameters of an asset, create artist-friendly controls and hand elements off to animators for easy interaction.

Feature highlights for Houdini 6.1 include drag-and-drop support for promoting handles and parameters onto a digital asset; a streamlined Pose Tool that makes it easier to animate digital asset characters; support for inverse kinematic squash-and-stretch of bones; pick-walking in a bone chain; new muscle and wire deformers; the ability to transfer attributes to a new piece of geometry; and a Flipbook feature for fast preview of OpenGL-rendered animations with audio. Additional features range from a new pelt surface operator for "unwrapping" texture UVs in a manner similar to real-world pelting to numerous interface and compositing enhancements, such as the customer-requested return of the Render COP.

Additional features include a UV Pelt Tool for unwrapping texture UVs by choosing cut lines then stretching out from a specified center point; a UV Brush Tool for editing and smoothing UVs by brushing either in the UV viewport or directly on the 3D geometry; Edge Loops for a streamlined edge selection workflow; a Poly Bevel Tool for quickly beveling edges and points; a Path Tool for creating curves at the object level that work with path animation and follow curve solutions; a Bones-on-Curve Tool for quickly distributing a set number of bones on a curve, with follow curve kinematics if desired; a Wire Deform Tool for capturing and deforming geometry using curves as control objects; and numerous interface and compositing enhancements.

Pricing starts at $1,299 and scales up from there.