Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 8, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Anyone earning less than USD 100,000 per year has long been able to purchase a Houdini Indie license from SideFX. Restrictions related mainly to the use of the license and the resolution of rendered image sequences. With the Production Build Update 16.5.378, SideFX has significantly relaxed these restrictions.
- Render resolution has now been increased from 1920 x 1080 pixels to 4K x 4K. This relates to the rendering of image sequences; stills are unlimited.
- A second installation of Houdini is now also possible with the Indie license. An artist can therefore use Houdini on two computers/laptops.
- Indie prices have also been adjusted. One year of Indie now costs a little more at the equivalent of 220 euros. SideFX also offers a two-year Indie license for the equivalent of 326 euros. To the price and feature overview.
The change in resolution to 4K is activated automatically when the new 16.5.378 build is installed, but not for older versions. Existing Indie users also receive the second installation license from February 20! Download
Further Feature Updates
Alongside these license updates, SideFX has also taken care of several new features, with a new UV Flatten node and improvements for FBX import and export.
- New UV Flatten Node: Includes spectral and angle-based UV flattening, among other things. Edge Groups can also be used to define seams. Also new are Pin Vertex and Align Vertex tools to adjust UVs better, as well as a Repack feature to remove overlapping automatically.
- Extended FBX support: Enables object import of FBX files, with transforms baked directly into the points. Material names and custom FBX properties are accessible as primitive attributes. LODs can also now be imported and exported.
For further information: To the SideFX website
