One of the main uses of Houdini is to create realistic animations and effects for movies and games: simulating the movement of particles, smoke, fire, explosions, destruction of various materials, etc. Houdini is often one of the main tools of VFX artists – the professionals who are in charge of visual effects. You can use the program to fully develop a scene of a meteorite falling or a dragon flying over a city, or to create relatively simple and short clips to promote a product.
Other important applications:
Creating game spaces and combining them into coherent locations (e.g., dungeons);
procedural generation of maps for the game interface;
creation of assets (game resources), which are sets of models of the same type used in game development, for example for the design of locations.
Houdini is very popular with Unity- and UE-developers: many note its easy and user-friendly interface as well as its considerable possibilities for creating models and effects.
Features of the Houdini Apprentice
3D modeling. Primitives, Bezier curves, polygons, splines, planes and many other things that 3D designers working in other programs are used to. In Houdini Apprentice you can create a landscape, a structure, a vehicle, an animal, a person, a fictional character, etc. You can work with particles that allow you to simulate, for example, fire, smoke, a tornado, an explosion, a galaxy and much more.
Shading and lighting elaboration. Correct and beautiful light is extremely important in movies and games. In Houdini Apprentice you can adjust in detail both spot and general lighting to create the right atmosphere. The program does a great job of making both day and night from the same simulated scene with logical light sources. “Houdini” allows you to line up the lighting of complex objects: glass, jewels, water, hair, etc.
Rendering. The program has its own rendering engine, Mantra. This is a CPU-renderer, that is, it works with the computer’s central processor. Mantra is good at rendering different types of objects, both simple and complex.
Animation creation. Houdini Apprentice has keyframe animation as well as extensive character animation capabilities. Using different tools for character movement: rigging, skeletons, calculating hair and wool physics, etc.
Elaboration of dynamics. Dynamics refers to how the appearance of the object or object changes in motion. For example, how the cloth ripples when the wind blows, or how waves rise and fall on the river.
Noda is a program unit of the Houdini interface, an operator that denotes certain parameters of a 3D object. The node looks like a rectangle with incoming and outgoing connections. Each action in the program (e.g. adding a geometric figure or a light source) generates its own node and you can return to any of them to change parameters or remove them.