Houdini Engine is now available for free for Unreal and Unity game developers. Houdini is a popular long running 3D application from SideFX software that is known for it’s procedural approach to basically the entire 3D process. Houdini Engine is a runtime that enables you to run Houdini generated simulations in other applications, such as Maya, Unreal and Unity. With today’s announcement, Unity and Unreal Engine users will be able to use Houdini Engine in their games, completely free.
Details of the announcement:
SideFX is pleased to announce that Houdini Engine for UE4 and Houdini Engine for Unity are now available for commercial customers for free. Previously free for artists using Houdini Indie, this now gives commercial artists and studios the ability to widely deploy procedural assets created in Houdini to the UE4 and Unity real-time 3D platforms for use in game and XR development, virtual production and design visualizations.
Through the power of Houdini Engine, procedural tools and assets built in Houdini with custom-tailored interfaces can be brought into UE4 and Unity, and used by game artists whether they know Houdini or not. Houdini Engine does the processing work on the assets, and delivers the results back to the editor. These procedural assets work within the editor for content creation and are baked out before going to runtime.
Users will still need a Houdini Core/FX or Indie license to be able to author Houdini content, although it will make it possible for them to run Houdini simulations created by other users. Unfortunately the free version of Houdini, Houdini Apprentice does not work with Houdini Engine. You can learn more about the Unity plugin here and the Unreal Engine plugin here.
To learn more about Houdini Engine becoming free for Unreal Engine and Unity developers watch the video below.