(This post has been moved from the NEWS forum to allow for discussion.)

We’re happy to share an exciting update: Epic Games is now a minority investor in SideFX. In Epic, SideFX gains a strong partner whose passion for the industry closely aligns with ours.

Kim Davidson remains the majority owner of SideFX, as well as President and CEO. He continues his strong, unwavering commitment to SideFX’s staff, customers, and partners.

SideFX and Epic are both committed to SideFX continuing its work with other industry partners - including all other content creation applications and game engines. This new development will have no impact at all on the Houdini development roadmap, as SideFX will continue to define its own path as an industry-leading procedural 3D platform for the film, TV, advertising and games sectors.

One of the biggest questions is, does this investment include any sharing of IP between SideFX/Epic?

Virtual Production in Unreal is all the rage, may we see Unreal as a Delegate/ROP?

SideFX invested several months in maturing a product that describes Houdini assets to Unreal via HoudiniEngine, seems likely that some additional synergies can be realized there.

Congratulations on the investment, SideFX, and I hope this will help to hire more developers to deliver more excellent engineering to already outstanding tools you are delivering. It is great that the investment comes from another inventive company and the true power of synergy between passionate users, developers and management from both companies. I am very happy because of this and looking forward how this will effect the audiovisual industry in near future.

Q: Does this investment include any sharing of IP between SideFX/Epic?
A: No it doesn't.

Q: May we see Unreal as a Delegate/ROP?
A: Possibly, but this agreement doesn't change their roadmap or ours.

Regarding the third point, we'll continue at full speed our development of all Houdini Engine plug-ins.

As some character says: “This is the way.” This is good news for everyone, 3dMax grew hand in hand with video games, now it's Houdini's turn. Congratulations.

Everyone would always compare applications but now epic games changed the game by investing in Side FX. Hope to see more improvements in Houdini

As long as Kim has a majority stake, I am happy.

jordibares
As long as Kim has a majority stake, I am happy.

There are plenty of talented developers indie wise pushing the limits of Unreal and Houdini for this to get interesting.

I love Houdini and Unreal, version 2 of the plugin, other than some crashes here and there is a really solid piece of software design wise.

Most of all SideFX, thank you for ALL your APIs, they are like the yellow brick road to Houdini. (VEX, Py and C++)