Volumetrics – With its native CloudFx and PyroFx toolsets, Houdini can create clouds, smoke and fire simulations.Rendering – Houdini ships with SideFX's rendering engines Mantra and Karma Houdini Indie licence and up support 3rd party rendering engines, such as Renderman, Octane, Arnold, Redshift, V-ray, Maxwell(soon).Lighting – node-based shader authoring, lighting and re-lighting in an IPR viewer.Dynamics – Rigid Body Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, Wire Dynamics, Cloth Simulation, Crowd simulation.Animation – Keyframed animation and raw channel manipulation (CHOPs), motion capture support.Modeling – All standard geometry entities including Polygons, (Hierarchical) NURBS/ Bézier Curves/Patches & Trims, Metaballs.Houdini covers all the major areas of 3D production, including these: SideFX also publishes Houdini Apprentice, a limited version of the software that is free of charge for non-commercial use.

It has been used in many feature animation productions, including Disney's feature films Fantasia 2000, Frozen, Zootopia and Raya and the Last Dragon the Blue Sky Studios film Rio, and DNA Productions' Ant Bully. It is used by major VFX companies such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Double Negative, ILM, MPC, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Scanline VFX, Method Studios and The Mill. Houdini is most commonly used for the creation of visual effects in film and television. Some of its procedural features have been in existence since 1987. The procedural tools are used to produce different effects such as complex reflections, animations and particles system. Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by Toronto-based SideFX, who adapted it from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools.

Sidefx houdini fx 15 windows