Tuesday, April 26th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

Houdini Indie to get support for third-party renderers

160426_HoudiniIndieRendering

Side Effects Software has announced that Houdini Indie will soon support third-party renderers, including Arnold, RenderMan, OctaneRender, V-Ray and Redshift, alongside its native Mantra renderer.

Outputs to other standard production renderers, but resolution still capped at 1080p
First announced in 2014, Houdini Indie is a $199/year edition of Houdini available for use by anyone with annual earnings of less than $100,000.

It has all the same toolsets as the $4,495 Houdini FX, but it saves files in its own, non-interchangeable native scene format, and render resolution is capped at 1080p for animation.

Those restrictions don’t change, but the Indie edition’s other main limitation – that you couldn’t use it with third-party render engines – is about to be removed.

Support for Arnold, RenderMan and OctaneRender is coming first: alongside the release of Houdini 15.5 next month. Support for V-Ray and Redshift will follow as open releases “sometime later in 2016”.

Unlike Houdini FX, data from Houdini Indie will go direct to the renderer, rather than being exported in Houdini’s IFD render scene description format.

Pricing and availability
Houdini 15 Indie is available now for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X for anyone with annual earnings of less than $100,000/year. It’s rental-only, and priced at $199/year.

Third-party rendering support will be a free update to users on active subscriptions when Houdini 15.5 is released “at the end of May 2016”.

Read more about Houdini Indie on Side Effects Software’s website