Houdini 19 brings exciting new tools and workflow improvements for VFX artists, modelers, animators, and lighters. As an animation and VFX professional, upgrading to Houdini 19 could significantly boost your productivity and creativity. In this in-depth guide, I’ll highlight the most important additions that can benefit your day-to-day work.
Faster, More Intuitive Modeling Tools
Houdini 19 introduces major improvements to its modeling and UV layout tools, making it faster and easier to create production-quality assets.
Enhanced Modeling Workflow
The modeling workflow has been streamlined and accelerated. Some key upgrades include:
- Faster viewport performance when working with dense geometry
- Improved selection tools like box and lasso select
- New multi-threading capabilities for snappier feedback
With these improvements, I can now model complex assets interactively without slowdowns. The upgraded tools save me time and make the whole process more intuitive.
UV Enhancements
Houdini 19 also brings useful enhancements to UV unwrapping and texture baking:
- The UV Flatten SOP can now pack UVs more tightly and efficiently
- Baking texture maps is much faster due to multi-threading
- UV diagnostics help me visualize stretching, overlap, and texture resolution at a glance
The streamlined UV tools help me quickly unwrap and texture complex models to get them ready for rendering. The optimized baking makes it practical to bake out full-resolution texture maps of very dense meshes.
Redesigned Lighting Tools
Lighting and look development also gets a major boost in Houdini 19. The new tools make it easier to light, render, and composite shots.
Improved Lighting Rig Workflow
Building lighting rigs is now much more artist-friendly:
- The new Light Mixer view makes it easy to shape light intensity and color
- Bookmarks let me save and recall rig states
- Environment light previews let me visualize lighting while building the rig
With these improvements, I can now iterate on creative lighting ideas more quickly without having to fully render each test. The intuitive Light Mixer gives me similar flexibility as working with lights in a 3D viewport.
New Light Types
Houdini 19 introduces two new light types:
- Ring lights are ideal for macro photography and closeups
- Rectangular area lights give soft directional lighting with nice falloff
These new options make it easy to create photorealistic lighting setups. The rectangular area lights in particular give me soft lighting with a shape better suited to interior scenes than spherical lights.
Enhanced Composition Tools
Compositing and look development also gets easier with Houdini 19:
- New multi-layer EXR workflow to composite CG renders
- Lens distortion nodes for realistic camera effects
- Improved color grading tools for quick look dev
These tools help me composite rendered elements more easily and add convincing camera effects like distortion, vignetting, and depth of field. The enhanced color grading tools also let me develop final looks directly in Houdini.
Simulations – Thicker Fluids, Optimized Crowds
Houdini 19 enhances VFX simulations with thicker, more viscous fluids and optimized crowd animation.
Viscous Fluid Sims
The new Viscous Fluid tools allow highly detailed, viscous fluid effects like:
- Melted chocolate
- Toothpaste
- Slime
By increasing yield stress, I can easily create thick, gooey fluids that hold peaks and detailed shapes rather than just splashing everywhere. The viscous fluids open up new creative possibilities for liquid FX.
Optimized Crowd Sims
Crowd simulations have also been optimized and enhanced:
- New proxemics behaviors for avoidance, comfort, and social groups
- Automatic obstacle avoidance
- Support for crowds with over 100,000 agents
- Improved rendering performance
Thanks to these upgrades, I can easily create massive crowd shots with natural, lifelike motion and reactions. Complex crowd shots are now faster and easier to set up.
Plenty More!
Those are just a few of the biggest workflow improvements for VFX and animation artists. Houdini 19 also includes:
- New mesh skinning tools
- Enhanced animation editors
- Better support for AAA game engines
- Updates to terrain tools
- Improved physics rigging
Houdini keeps getting better with each release. For artists doing high-end VFX, Houdini 19’s modeling, lighting, and crowd simulation upgrades make it an essential upgrade. It introduces new creative possibilities while speeding up everyday tasks.
