Tuesday, September 23rd, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

SolidAngle releases Arnold for Houdini


The latest Arnold demo reel. Developer Solid Angle has just released its new Houdini to Arnold plugin, alongside the existing Maya and Softimage versions. A Cinema 4D plugin is also in development.

Solid Angle has released its Houdini to Arnold (HtoA or just ‘Arnold for Houdini’) plugin, providing a bridge to the renderer from Houdini in the same way as the existing Maya and Softimage plugins.

HtoA was announced at FMX earlier this year, and officially launched at Siggraph.

According to Solid Angle’s press release, new features include:

  • Render in any Houdini context: render view, render region or MPlay
  • Interactive rendering to rapidly preview parameter changes in cameras, lights and shaders
  • Dedicated Arnold shading networks with 106 shaders and utilities
  • Pass Houdini geometry attributes as Arnold user data
  • Volume rendering using OpenVDB
  • Particles, rendered as disks, spheres, quads or volumes
  • Curves, rendered as ribbon, thick or oriented
  • Accurate motion blur, including changing topology
  • Full point instancing
  • All Arnold cameras projections, with depth of field and advanced shutter controls
  • All Arnold lights, with light filters and accurate viewport representation
  • Atmospheric and background effects
  • Multi-camera rendering
  • Render to AOVs, in single or separate files
  • DeepEXR support

The HtoA plugin is available for three recent builds of Houdini 13 on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It’s a free download. A new licence of Arnold itself costs $1,300.

Read the release notes for Houdini to Arnold 1.0.0