SideFX continues to expand its Houdini toolkit: SideFX Labs has a free procedural bridge-building asset for Houdini.
This new tool allows artists to generate procedural bridges with complete control over deck curvature, width, railing types, and support structures. Parameters can be adjusted non-destructively, enabling fast iterations directly within Houdini’s node-based environment — without the need for manual remodeling every time the art director changes their mind.
Designed to survive — and collapse — on cue, the procedural bridges are fully animatable. Users can simulate destruction, dynamic sagging, or scripted failures, leveraging Houdini’s physics systems without needing to rebuild or reweight meshes.
The tool is available immediately through SideFX Labs, which collects SideFX’s experimental and work-in-progress tools. Installation follows the standard Labs workflow via the Houdini package manager or manual GitHub download. As always with Labs assets, users are advised to verify project-specific stability before integrating the tool into production pipelines.
Procedural Freedom: Build, Animate, Destroy
According to SideFX, the bridge tool provides full procedural access:
- Adjust deck shape and width procedurally.
- Customize railing styles and supporting structures.
- Animate destruction sequences or dynamic deformations natively in Houdini.
The tool extends Houdini’s already formidable procedural modeling toolkit — fitting neatly into pipelines for environment building, games, VFX, or animated films where you want your characters’ journey to become… unexpectedly wet.
Available Now — Just Add Labs
The bridge builder is bundled inside the current SideFX Labs release at no extra cost. Given that Labs tools are experimental by nature, checking the asset’s behavior in your Houdini setup is strongly recommended before pressing it into full production duty. For more updates on free Houdini tools — including ruins and organic flesh modeling — see our related article on Project Grots: Houdini Tools for Ruins and Flesh. Because in Houdini, whether you’re building bridges or crumbling cathedrals, it’s all procedural — and it’s all gloriously unstable if you want it to be.
