SideFX revealed Houdini 17.5

SideFX finally revealed the new Houdini 17.5 at their Launch Event.

The event’s main speakers were Cristin Barghiel, Vice President of R&D at SideFX, Scott Keating, Senior Product Designer, Ken Xu, Senior Software Architect, and Special Guest Bill Polson, Global head of Pipeline and Workflow at MPC Film.

“Whether you are a feature film VFX artist, a game developer or a commercial studio, Houdini 17.5 brings you new and enhanced tools to meet your most demanding production requirements.” — Developers promised.

What’s new?

Houdini 17.5 is an important release that includes a number of key features, such as the introduction of a PDG (Procedural Dependency Graph). This new technology is available for the next release of Houdini 17.5 as a new Houdini operating context called TOPs (Task Operators) and as a separate application called PilotPDG ™.

PDG was designed to:

• Describe complex dependencies visually with nodes;
• Transform that dependency description into a set of actionable, schedulable tasks;
• Distribute those tasks with the help of a scheduler and compute them in parallel.

Release Date

The release of Houdini 17.5 and PilotPDG is scheduled for mid-March 2019.

By the way, check out the recent free product from SideFX technical artist — a plugin for photogrammetry in Houdini AliceVision.