Planet Alpha | Adrian Lazar

HOUDINI INDIE

As an independent filmmaker or indie game developer, your goal is to create professional-quality work with a small team and tight budget. Houdini Indie helps you accomplish this by making all the features of Houdini FX affordable for indies. 

INDIE GAMEDEV

MODELING

Interactive & Procedural

Whether you are modeling by hand or working procedurally, Houdini Indie helps you create large models faster than ever before. The modeling tools in Houdini Indie make it easier to create good surface topology for use in Film, TV, Games and VR, and can be used interactively in the viewport or procedurally in the Network editor. Choose from a wide variety of polygon, NURBS and Subdivision Surface modeling tools while procedural techniques can be used to maintain a robust construction history and to create highly detailed models.

CHARACTER

Rigging & Animation

Houdini Indie offers a complete solution for rigging and animating characters and creatures. These tools include Auto-rigging, Muscle and Flesh, Vellum Cloth, Hair and Fur and more. The new Biharmonic skin capturing will save riggers valuable time while the FEM-based muscles produces high-realism results. 

The node-based approach fits perfectly with the working methodology of a typical character rigging TD. Characters can be easily wrapped up into a pipeline-friendly Digital Asset node to be animated using invisible rigs, the character picker and the pose library. Houdini Indie also includes a full Crowd solution to handle mid-background characters.

Artwork by eXiin | Ary & the Secret of Seasons

VFX

Particles and Dynamics

From Bullet Rigid Body destruction, to Pyro FX fire and smoke, to sand and snow, and FLIP fluid liquids, Houdini Indie empowers you to create bigger, more explosive visual effects. Using the same tools deployed by top film and game studios, you can simulate a wide range of natural effects. All of these solvers work in an integrated environment making it possible to layer FX seamlessly with your characters and environments.

TERRAIN

Generation

The terrain system in Houdini Indie lets you layer and edit terrain easily with tools such as procedural noise, or paint or mask out areas directly. The operations are very similar to image compositing, so terrain artists will find the Houdini Indie workflow familiar. The terrain can then collide with Fluid simulations, Crowd agents, Particles, RBD/destruction and Pyro FX – without converting the heightfields into geometry.

Artwork by Aron Kamolz

RENDERING

Lighting & Texturing

Houdini Indie’s lighting workflow provides a flexible and powerful environment for managing lights, building shaders and defining the look of a shot. With Houdini Indie, you can rely on a built-in physically-based rendering solution called Mantra along with support for a wide variety of third party renderers such as Renderman, Redshift, Arnold, V-Ray, 3Delight and Octane.

GAME DEV

Production Tools

The Game industry is facing an explosion of demand for volume and quality of content to create bigger and richer worlds. Houdini Indie’s procedural workflow can automate repetitive tasks, and allow game dev teams to generate more high quality content with a more focused effort. Houdini Indie shortens iteration time, thereby improving game play by allowing for much more variation in the game. Indie pricing is affordable for everyone, including free Engine Indie, while providing the same powerful platform used by AAA developers.

HOUDINI ENGINE INDIE

Plug-ins to Host Applications

Houdini Engine brings a procedural node-based approach to some of your favorite apps. In Houdini, build nodes networks that define a recipe that can be applied over and over, then wrap them up to create custom smart assets. Share these assets with colleagues who can load them directly into 3D apps such as Autodesk® Maya,® Autodesk® 3ds Max,®  or into game editors such as Unity® or Unreal Engine.®

Artwork by Natalia Loktionova

INDIE LICENSE

Commercial usage of Houdini Indie is limited to following:

  • The annual gross revenue of commercial entities and contracting entities does not exceed $100K USD
  • Any funding received by this Organization or its Affiliates, including private equity, venture capital, angel or mezzanine financing, and all other forms of funding, in the last 24 months is less than $1,000,000 USD
  • Commercial entities and contracting entities can purchase a maximum of 3 Houdini Indie and 3 Houdini Engine Indie
  • Houdini Indie includes a supplementary license for use on a second computer/laptop or to work in dual boot mode
  • The use of these two licenses is restricted to a single artist, who can only use Houdini Indie on one of these computers at a time
  • Houdini Indie cannot be used in the same pipeline as commercial versions of Houdini
  • Houdini Indie uses its own file format for saving scenes and assets
  • Houdini Indie works with the following third party renderers: RenderMan, Arnold, Redshift, V-Ray, 3Delight and OctaneRender.
Please refer to the EULA [End User License Agreement] for specific details regarding these restrictions.

LEARN HOUDINI

Learn how to use Houdini’s node-based workflow to create optimized game art using tutorials created by industry professionals and by SideFX.