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Houdini 12 Sneak Peak

August 10, 2011 - Yesterday at the Houdini User Group Meeting at SIGGRAPH 2011, Side Effects Software offered audiences a sneak peek of the next major version — Houdini 12 — with its focus on speed and performance. Side Effects is excited to now share this exciting news with the whole community.

Key Houdini 12 Features

Houdini 12 is shaping up to be a game-changing release and the following list shows you some of the new version’s key features. More information about the impact of this important release will be available when Houdini 12 goes into beta in October.

New Geometry Engine - Houdini 12 includes a completely new geometry engine which will make Houdini faster and more memory efficient. The geometry engine makes Houdini’s core thread-safe and opens the door for extensive multi-threads. Side Effects will be multi-threading key geometry-related nodes in Houdini 12 and will continue this work in future releases.

Houdini 12 will have a new geometry format which will make it possible to open bigger files more efficiently. You will even be able to selectively load parts of a geo file. Rotating geometry will be at least twice as fast in Houdini 12 while deleting groups from a large model can go as high as 1200x faster.

Memory use will go way down especially with attribute-heavy geometry where many operations are applied. Artists will save as much as 80% in memory use compared to Houdini 11, depending on the complexity of the scene.

The gains in memory efficiency mean that you can do more with the system you have. With a 24GB machine, Houdini 11 was able to create about 7 million points in a FLIP fluids sim. With Houdini 12, early tests have shown that number to be around 77 million. And we haven’t even fully optimized the code yet.

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