Side Effects Software may be an underdog in numbers, but its list of studio clients is impressive and growing.

Rendering
Houdini, like other high-end production packages, features a powerful set of rendering features. Mantra, Houdini's built-in renderer (network licenses are available separately), is a powerful renderer particularly for particle effects, since it is adept at volumetric rendering. This is key for creating realistic smoke and related effects, and one of the principle challenges of particle dynamics.

Houdini supplies a shader language, VEX, that is a robust environment for creating shaders in Mantra, mental ray and RenderMan format, and its support for all rendering environments is excellent.

Houdini's innovative visual interface for creating RenderMan shaders makes it a unique environment for harnessing the power of the renderer. In other applications, RenderMan is very much the domain of code-savvy TDs, limiting its utility for the texture artists who ultimately need finer control over shaders and their properties.

Unfortunately, even at the rarified $17,000 price point, Houdini offers no native support for hair or fur shaders, although it does offer tools for procedural plant and tree generation. Houdini is also conspicuously lacking a computational fluid dynamics simulation engine, although third parties, such as NextLimit's RealFlow offer plug-in support for Houdini.

Compositing
However, $17,000 does buy you a compositing system built in the 3D environment, and compelling arguments can be made for the capability to composite effects and animation data within the 3D environment. Background plates, for example, can be integrated into textural, lighting and dynamic effects.

Which Houdini?
One of the challenges of working Houdini into a pipeline will be deciding which version of the software to buy. The company provides a range of versions, each with a selection of Houdini Master's all-you-can-eat menu of functionality. Side Effects Software offers an apprentice program that allows you to download and work with a restricted version of the application, which is an excellent introduction to Houdini's power.

Thus, Houdini is a compellingly powerful effects animation package that can fit into almost any production environment. Its procedural power is particularly evident in creation of dynamic effects and particle systems, and version 7 is the cleanest, most capable version yet.

Sean Wagstaff is a freelance technical director who creates special effects for film and games, most recently for Double Fine Prods. and The Orphanage.