Houdini Apprentice HD
Houdini is a powerful 3D modeling and animation application used by professional 3D artists from around the world. Using a production-proven node-based architecture, Houdini makes it easy for artists to generate high-quality art that is easy to update as the needs of your project evolves. Houdini now supports export of models and animations to .dts for use in Torque Game Engine (TGE) or Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA).
The best part about all this is that independent game developers can now use Houdini for the low price of $99. The Houdini Apprentice HD edition gives you access to Houdini's full feature set at a great price. Houdini Apprentice HD offers the same indie licensing that the Torque game engines do, making it the ideal solution for all your game art. If your game goes mainstream then you can upgrade to a commercial version and you are all set.
Houdini was built for professionals but designed for beginners. The new interface in Houdini 9 makes learning Houdini easier than ever before.
Nodes and Assets - As an artist and animator, you use your CG tools to bring life to your ideas. Along the way, you make creative decisions that are necessary to achieve your goals. A lot of these decisions involve experimenting and reworking ideas to get them just right. In Houdini, each of these decisions is recorded as a node that is wired up to other nodes. The resulting network provides a blueprint of your creative process and a framework for making revisions.
Modeling - Houdini's modeling tools can be used by modellers to create characters, sets and props or by visual effects artists to give particles and fluids shape and form. For traditional modelers, Houdini provides a robust set of tools that work with a wide variety of geometry types. For visual effects artists, Houdini's node-based workflow makes it easy to set up surfaces that are generated on the fly based on an underlying effect.
Animation - Whether you are bringing characters to life or creating high-powered visual effects, the ability to freely animate anything and everything is critical. Houdini not only lets you animate any parameter but with transition nodes such as switch and blend you can easily animate back and forth between completely different networks.
Scripting - Scripting and programming play an important role in setting up production pipelines and tools. With Houdini's node-based workflow and Digital Asset technology many tasks normally reserved for the programming team can now be handled by artists. Beyond that there are a number of robust scripting and programming tools available in Houdini with Python playing a key role.
Lighting - Houdini's lighting workflow provides a flexible and powerful environment for creating lights, building shaders and defining the look of a shot. Light and material shaders are created using Houdini's procedural node-based shader builder featuring dozens of shader operations.
Rendering - At the back-end of any CG project is where you render all your lights, geometry, and effects. With Houdini, you can rely on a robust built-in rendering solution called Mantra or full support for a wide variety of third party rendering options. Whatever route you choose, Houdini is the ideal environment for bringing together your render layers and reliably feeding the farm.
Compositing - While you likely rely on an outside team of compositors to layer effects onto live action plates or tweak render passes, it does not hurt to do a little compositing as part of the lighting and rendering of your shots. With node-based compositors offering the most robust solution when working in production, Houdini's approach carries over well to this area of production.
Particles - From dust to debris to flocks of birds, particles offer a strong foundation on which you can build any effect. Houdini is most famous for its node-based particle workflow that lets you define a set of rules using interactive tools.
Dynamics - Create realistic motion that meets the creative needs of your director using Houdini's integrated dynamics tools. Built so that different solvers can talk to each other, you can simulate using any combination of Rigid Body, Fluid, Cloth and Wire solvers to create boundary-busting effects.
Character - From cartoon characters that squash and stretch to hyper-realistic digital creatures, character rigs continue to get more and more sophisticated to meet the growing expectations of audiences. Houdini provides a robust character solution that can be used as part of a visual effect or as a larger animation pipeline.
Windows XP and Vista
Mac OS X
Linux: Tested on Fedora Core 6, RHEL 4, Ubuntu 7.10 and Debian 3.1 and 4.0
Memory
1 GB required (2-4 GB+ Recommended)
Processor
Recent generation 32 or 64 bit AMD or Intel processors (requires SSE or higher)
Disk Space
500 MB free hard drive space
Input Devices
3 Button mouse required
Scroll wheel used where present
Wacom tablet recommended for Houdini's brush-based tools
Graphics Card
Workstation-class OpenGL graphics card (such as NVidia and ATI)
Minimum resolution: 1024 x 768 (1920 x 1200 widescreen recommended)
Color depth of 16-bit+ required (32-bit+ "true color" recommended)
Requires support for OpenGL 1.2 or later; Takes advantage of OpenGL 2.0
Hardware-accelerated OpenGL required for optimum performance
Performance may suffer with complex scenes on non-workstation graphics careds and on laptops
Houdini does not require support for Direct3D
Other
Sound card and speakers/headset required for audio
Class C network (TCP/IP) recommended for floating licenses
Network support required for offline simulation, batch processing and rendering
Internet browser required for connection to www.sidefx.com (Houdini Exchange and Forums)
Video encoder required for creating AVI/QT/etc.