Thursday, May 26th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

Get the new Substance plugin for Houdini

Allegorithmic has integrated its Substance Engine technology into Houdini 15.5, making it possible for Houdini users to import and edit textures in the Substance format natively.

Work with a standard games texture format natively in Houdini
A lightweight procedural format for textures used by Allegorithmic’s applications Substance Designer and Substance Painter, Substances are widely used in modern game development.

At the minute, Substances can be read natively by 3ds Max, Maya and the Unity game engine; and imported into and edited in Cinema 4D, Modo, Unreal Engine and Lumberyard via free plugins.

The integration with Houdini falls in the latter camp, with a new free plugin enabling users to import Substance materials, visualise them in the viewport, and edit them using Houdini’s standard tools.

Houdini Expressions can also be used to attach variables to Substances, making it easier to animate textures.

When complete, assets using Substances can be exported to Unity, or rendered using either Houdini’s built-in Mantra renderer, Arnold or RenderMan, the latter requiring a “simple script”.

Pricing and availability
The Substance plugin is compatible with Houdini 15.5 on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It’s a free download.

Download the Substance plugin for Houdini from Allegorithmic’s website