It was free - With every sold Houdini Indie license you got 3 nodes of the Engine. But now people can use the engine and assets created by others, without paying anything.
SideFX is pleased to announce that Houdini Engine Indie is now available for free (previously $99). Independent game devs and CG artists can now freely load Houdini Digital Assets built using Houdini’s procedural node-based workflow into apps such as Unity, UE4, Maya and Cinema4D. http://sidefx.co/1P98w5q
Yeah, I must admit I have been quite puzzled by their marketing and communication. So basically there's Houdini to create complex procedural assets (not free), and then a plugin to inject these into a game engine, itself called "Engine" (this plugin was formerly not free, and now free for "indies"). Is that right ?
They do have many videos demonstrating the capabilities of the Houdini Engine in UE4,but they are just not showasing them as they should. This video for example shows a really great tool that paints Ivy in vertex painted areas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k31c4sTjYNY You can find many other stuff like this just by…
yeah. For a moment I fell for it too. I was like "Free Houdini for Indies! Finally!.. no..oh, drat. Just the engine". Imho the engine should have been free to begin with. Unless I totally mistaken (and maybe I am?), it's not really that useful if you don't have Houdini as well, or if you are ok relying on other people's…
those "assets" aren't standard assets like we know,and should be considered more as tools than assets. To simply put it,Houdini lets you create tools that are exportable in many softwares with the help of the Houdini Engine. These assets are like plugins.Someone created a Mesh Fusion like asset for Max,Maya and C4D and…
SideFX isn't Autodesk. They don't have massive budget and staff for marketing like Autodesk and it shows. Frankly I will take SideFX superior engineering and support over the slick marketing and legal departments of Autodesk. @Pior SideFX has a license of Houdini called apprentice, that is basically an unlimited demo.
Any thoughts, years after? I'm looking at different aspects and am hesitant wether to use the in-editor (ue) Houdini Engine or not. It's quite a commitment/trust depending on project size so far so I'm experimenting out of project. Any feedback after integrating it in production would be appreciated.
@Fansub : I love tools like this ivy generator - it's really great when this kind of stuff comes together, often as a collaboration between engineers and artists. It's a big part of what makes working in games so interesting ! @Goldfarb, @Aabel : They don't need to be Autodesk, they just need to seriously rethink their…