TORONTO — Side Effects Software (www.sidefx.com) is at SIGGRAPH with Houdini Indie, which makes all of Houdini’s animation and VFX tools available under a limited commercial license to independent animators and game makers. Priced at $199, Houdini Indie is designed to allow animators to design, experiment and create.
Houdini Indie includes the same procedural node-based workflow and features as the commercial version of Houdini and the physically-based Mantra renderer. It can be used in all stages of animation and game production, including procedural modeling, character animation, lighting, rendering, effects and compositing. Houdini Indie also gives artists renderfarm access using HQueue on Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud.
Indie and the standalone Houdini Engine Indie can be used to load Houdini digital assets into other content creation apps such as Maya, Cinema4D, and 3DS Max, or game editors such as Unity and Unreal. Houdini digital assets can be accessed from the Orbolt Smart 3D Asset Store or created in Houdini Indie for sharing with other artists.
Houdini Indie is priced at $199 annually, while Houdini Engine Indie is available for $99 annually. Houdini Indie replaces Houdini Apprentice HD, which was only available for non-commercial projects.