Hello,

Houdini has incredible capabilities for film, simulation, architecture and maybe some other fields. I was wondering if it was also suitable for the video game industry.

By that I mean is it currently used by some video game companies? Do you know which ones, and for what?

I've heard Valve used it for water flow maps generation… Are they the only one?


Thank you

Houdini + Killzone 2:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1454&Itemid=68 [sidefx.com]

Thanks a lot.

Very interesting use of Houdini for KillZone 2


Hum, at the end it looks like it doesn't make so many video game companies…

Actually Houdini is being used by more and more game companies to complete a variety of tasks from game cinematics, in-game VFX, procedural asset generation and more specific tasks such as the generation of terrain.

On our site we generally talk about the film and VFX side of things because that is what Houdini is used for the most but games companies are discovering Houdini and putting it to good use. We are looking for more game company stories to share this info but we usually have to wait until particular titles have come out and studios have time for telling stories.

A few of us were at the DIG conference [diglondon.ca] here in Ontario last week meeting with games companies and looking for better ways to make better games.

Robert

It appears that Blizzard is also using Houdini… Well, for cinematics, but still, its a game company.

It was recently used on the cinematic of Cataclysm, the last add-on for World of Warcraft. We can see a quick screenshot in the quick making of (at 1'24''):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Fq5gx2dmA [youtube.com]

Wow Houdini is the in thing these days looks like..I am impressed…

Houdini is awesome, but maybe it's strength is also it's weakness in a sense, at least in today fast moving world. While I notice Houdini used in a lot of movies, it's almost focusing on the special effect of it, usually those related to particles.

But then again, in today specialized world (even these day some people use Maya only for animating - they model in Silo and sculpt in ZBrush).

But nothing wrong with that, to each own I guess.

I found the slides on Valve's publications page, showing how they created water flows to help guide players. They used Houdini.

http://valvesoftware.com/publications/2010/siggraph2010_vlachos_waterflow.pdf [valvesoftware.com]

If I'm not mistaken Sega has been using it, though I don't know on what projects.