Houdini 14 ARRIVES crowds sand
The new crowd system, says Side Effects, uses artist friendly shelf tools along with a new packed agent primitive type, a Finite State Machine solver and hardware accelerated display of instanced crowds. The system has a seamless conduit to Houdini’s Mantra renderer and is equipped with controls for crowd layout, steering, collision avoidance, terrain adaptation, motion blending, and lookat targets.
This crowd pipeline is intended primarily for large, midtobackground, noninteracting crowds executing basic motions and can seamlessly interact with dynamic elements such as Bullet, fluids and sand. This pipeline will be enhanced in future releases to support more complex agent interactions and AI for creating hero quality crowds.
From preselection highlighting to new handles, improved edge-loop selection, new UV Flatten and UV Layout tools with UDIM support, an advanced visualizer architecture, custom panels and much more, this release will make it easier for artists to work procedurally.
Meanwhile, animators will appreciate the new faster Animation editor with Animation layers and significant speed improvements to the display and playback of rigs.
