Rhythm & Hues used Houdini to create Daredevil's Shadow World. All Daredevil images © 2003 FOX DAREDEVIL. Character Likeness: TM © 2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. Images Courtesy Rhythm & Hues

The very mention of Harry Houdini's name conjures up images of magic and wizardry, but for some reason, the great master preferred to be known as an escape artist. Perhaps it was just to distinguish himself from those he considered to be the hacks and amateurs working during his day. The distinction may seem narcissistic, but maybe Houdini wanted us to distinguish the skill and precision of an escape artist from the fantasy world that magic encompasses. A magician's success is partly due to a viewer's ability to suspend disbelief. We believe because we think the performer has a magic touch, a gift to reach into the unknown. An escape artist however, wins over his audience because he has studied and practiced his artform to the nth degree and has logically figured out every angle on how to escape detection.

So it is with the software Houdini. Leading VFX artists depend on Houdini for modeling, rendering and animation. Moreover, they are impressed by its ability to mesh with other software so that the artist has the freedom to easily create innovative images. VFXWorld interviewed supervisors from three top houses on why they think Houdini is an indispensable tool for them. It's not hard to figure out that Houdini's success lies in how its software allows artists to create seamless images that defy imagination and, yes, even escape detection.

Caleb Howard, Digital FX Supervisor for Rhythm & Hues
At Rhythm & Hues, we have embraced Side Effects Software’s Houdini across a number of departments for recent and forthcoming film projects, ranging from X-Men 2 and Gigli. The open, modular nature of Houdini allows us to take full advantage of the application’s power within our pipeline, and it’s very easy for our in-house software team to encapsulate our innovations within or alongside the Houdini open architecture.

For our recent work on Daredevil, a movie about a man who lives without fear, but also without sight, we used Houdini in tandem with custom software to create systems for volumetric effects, lighting and wrinkling control for the title character’s leather suit. Thirty of our shots were created using Houdini to represent Daredevil’s “Shadow World,” which required unique visual effects to show how super-heightened senses of sound and smell steer Daredevil through a vision-less existence.

Houdini's wrinkling technology helped make all of Daredevil's physical moves more realistic.

Our team worked closely with the director, Mark Steven Johnson, and the art directors to create volumetric effects such as spheres of light that depict essentially non-visual phenomena — for example, Daredevil’s acquisition of amplified hearing. Similar effects were developed to support other “Shadow World” scenes, such as one in which the sightless superhero navigates a crowded ballroom by smell only.

To light all of our effects shots, we built a “plug-and-play” HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting system around Houdini and our "Voodoo" software. This custom lighting model enabled multiple exposures from a digital camera to be taken and turned into a series of lights. Also for Daredevil, we developed a third Houdini pipeline that provided wrinkling technology. Each time we needed convincing CG effects when Daredevil flexes, we would take the animation, extract stretch-and-squash and key in different displacements using Houdini for the final rendering pass.