The hair and fur framework introduced in Houdini 16 has been enhanced with new grooming tools designed with the artist in mind.
Houdini continues to strengthen this toolset and is production-ready as you take your characters to the next level of realism. With Houdini 16.5, these tools get even stronger with features such as time-space motion path handles, enhanced grooming tools and facial and quadraped support in our autorigs. Houdini has tools for rigging and animating characters, adding Character FX such as muscles, hair and fur and generating realistic crowd simulations. Instead of processing the whole fluid band, only the Narrow Band is calculated while the quality of the splashes remain the same. The new Narrow Band fluid sims in Houdini 16.5 achieve these efficiencies by allowing you to focus on the liquid's surface. Imagine creating fluids sims that are 3X faster while consuming 3X less memory. Now bubbles are a directable part of your simulation and the results are natural looking and highly realistic. With Houdini 16.5, you can now use air incompressibility to create realistic movement of air within a fluid simulation. In the past, simulating fluids was easy but adding bubbles became a secondary task that would often lack the proper realism. These efficiencies allow you to either create bigger more impressive effects or allow small studios and individual artists to achieve effects that would have been prohibitive given hardware constraints. These new tools add new levels of realism while making you much more productive. Houdini is known for its dynamic simulation tools and with Houdini 16.5 a number of key improvements have been made to the simulation of liquids. These benefits touch all aspects of Houdini making this a great release for both artists and studios working in Film, TV, Gamedev and VR. With Houdini 16.5, this involves refining the user experience to make you more efficient while optimizing tools to work faster while consuming less memory. With each release of Houdini, SideFX strives to bring production-ready solutions to the challenges you face on a daily basis. SideFX is pleased to announce the release of Houdini 16.5 - which continues Houdini 16's push into character, rigging and animation enhancements - as well as adding a wide variety of new features and improvements in VFX, modelling, rendering and UI.