For a long time Houdini has been known as a vfx/animation tool that is extremely robust, enabling artists to easily ramp up and duplicate (without making exact duplicates) animations for large scale effects. What it has also been known for, fairly or unfairly, is that it is difficult to learn and struggles with more basic animation tasks. Houdini 9, now in beta but expected to be released within a month, should change all that.

The new UI is much more intuitive for new users and vets alike. Houdini 9 also adds to the more simple task of animating characters with the AutoRig feature to automatically create a base rig for a character, which can then be manipulated.

But the most impressive addition in Houdini 9 is the ability to create realistic fluids. And not only fluids that look real, but hose that interact with solids, and vice versa the solids interacting with each other and the fluids. I saw a simple rendering of balls dropped into a bathtub of water, and another of a bullet smashing a glass full of water, and the results are outstanding. In the case of the glass full of water, it’s not just a matter of building how the glass breaks and then adding water inside and animating how the water flows out of the broken glass. No. The presence of the water actually changes the way the glass breaks!

In terms of the amount of customers, Houdini has long been a tier down from the other major software companies, mainly because it was hard to use and there were some little tasks that it couldn’t handle. With Houdini 9, this could all change.

Houdini 9 Beta press release.