Houdini 22 keynote on YouTube: AI assistant for APEX Script still in preview

SideFX has posted the recording of the Houdini HIVE Equinox 2026 keynote on YouTube — the presentation «The State of Houdini». The company's developers, technical artists and invited production specialists walk through Houdini 22: the updated interface, production-ready rigging and animation, and an approach to machine learning in which control remains with the artist. There is a separate look at how Gaussian splats, character effects, Copernicus, Solaris and Karma come together in Houdini's procedural pipelines. The recording also includes what is not yet in the release: SideFX showed its current research into AI assistants.

AI assistant for APEX Script

AI in Houdini 22 is applied to writing code: the comfort package for APEX Script adds AI hints while coding, autocomplete and validation. In SideFX's wording, this is a preview of a tool that will ship later. APEX itself has also gained conventional tools for developing procedural rigs — for example a debugger that shows graph values in the viewport, making it easier to debug and verify custom rig systems.

Gaussian splats have reached production

Gaussian splats in Houdini 22 are declared production-ready. They can be created, animated, relit, simulated and composited as photorealistic 3D assets, and interactively at that. Splats are also built into rigging: they work in existing rig pipelines via reusable rig templates and interactive LODs. In animation, splats are treated as editable scene elements — procedural motion, physics and interaction with a character come together into dynamic environments that remain editable in real time.

The character block is being covered end to end

The character updates touch both rigging and animation: they cut setup time, improve consistency between assets and speed up editing, retargeting and procedural motion. Rigging gained reusable rig templates, improved retargeting and rig inversion that automatically handles extreme skeleton changes by applying procedural stretching. Templates adapt to characters with different proportions, and image-based controls (Drawables) provide configurable on-screen widgets and scalable icons in the viewport.

The biped pipeline is automated: rig recipes and templates with guided setup, automatic joint alignment, procedural selection sets. Imported FBX rigs with non-standard joint names and orientations are mapped to standardized biped templates, and skeleton retargeting and mocap transfers are automated. Procedural Set Driven Keys have been added, layering over the controls while still allowing keys to be added on top.

In animation, parallel rig evaluation delivers real-time playback and editing of several full characters. The APEX Character Picker offers configurable control layouts, selection sets and multi-panel interfaces, while facial animation gained facial cameras, flexible control layouts and pose libraries for lip sync. In the hotkey manager you can choose the APEX-traditional Animation layout with Maya hotkeys such as S for setting a key. The Motion Mixer has been extended with nested and transition clips. Full Body IK makes it possible to edit individual stretches of animation while preserving the surrounding motion, and ragdoll gained new forces — wind, turbulence, magnets and damping — plus impact thresholds by which physics and destruction kick in based on speed. The facial rig of the demo character Cedric is built on FACS blendshapes with wrinkle deformation and flat 2D controls, while the frog rig from Tumblehead uses real-time CUDA deformers, custom HDAs and APEX Script.

What else is in the release

The interface gained configurable themes with an editor and a global contrast slider, reworked preferences with search, more detailed tooltips, an updated color picker and a visual ramp catalog. In modeling — Quad Remesh with better quad flow and hard-edge recognition, interactive limit surface editing with subdivisions, Walk on Surface, curve animation and Split by Expression in SideFX Labs. In lookdev, Solaris gained tools for layout, world building and set dressing, while the Copernicus texturing tools, including new grunge maps and baking, have been brought to production quality. CFX artists are promised faster iteration on muscles, cloth, crowds and hair. In VFX — accelerated fracturing, metal tearing in the Bullet solver, GPU Pyro in Copernicus. Terrains and oceans have moved to Copernicus with texture simulations and animated maps suitable for games.

The architecture has changed as well: a new math library for gains in performance and numerical stability, new memory allocators for each platform and a technical preview of the build for Linux on ARM — SideFX mentions lower cloud compute costs and better power efficiency. A full breakdown of the new features is gathered on the Houdini 22 page.

Why SideFX is turning Houdini toward characters

The movement has been visible across several releases in a row: first KineFX, then APEX, now rig templates, parallel evaluation and CUDA deformers. This is likely a response to how studio structure has changed: layoffs and the shift to contractors make maintaining several parallel pipelines expensive, and a package that covers more stages without exports and loss of attributes wins on economics rather than on the length of its feature list.

With neural networks the calculation is different. The DCC market is currently diverging along several trajectories: some vendors are embedding image and motion generation as a ready-made service, some publicly reject generative AI, and against that backdrop SideFX emphasizes that control remains with the artist — and the first AI tool in the package turns out to be a code assistant rather than an image generator. If the trend holds, competition between packages will come down to how well AI features can be brought under production control: verifying the result and reproducing it a year later.

Why the AI assistant for APEX Script remained in preview: immature technology, caution on SideFX's part, a shortage of data on APEX?