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No need to water flowers in August: grow them in Houdini instead

12.08.2025
FLOPs is a free, KineFX-based HDA toolkit for creating and animating realistic flowers in Houdini, released by Danny Laursen.

KineFX blooms, without the watering can

With much of Europe in a heatwave, this is not prime gardening weather. Houdini users, however, can still cultivate flowers — minus the watering, soil, and sunburn. CGI artist Danny Laursen has released FLOPs (Floral Operators), a free and open-source set of Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs) built around the KineFX rigging and animation framework. FLOPs is designed to simplify the generation and animation of high-quality, render-ready flora.

The toolkit ships with preset “recipes” for complex flower rigs, while remaining fully editable for custom workflows. It integrates with Houdini’s standard node networks and supports custom attribute injection, allowing for fine-grained procedural control. FLOPs is available for download via Gumroad and GitHub, free of charge with an optional donation.

A computer screen displaying a 3D graphical interface with a dark background and a radial design in blue and pink. On the right, there are various tools and panels with sliders and settings for editing.
A computer screen displaying a 3D graphical interface with a dark background and a radial design in blue and pink. On the right, there are various tools and panels with sliders and settings for editing.

Installing FLOPs in Houdini

Laursen’s official installation process is as follows:

Step 1 – Download FLOPs
Obtain FLOPs from GitHub or Gumroad. Save it to a location where your Houdini packages live. Do not download it directly into your Documents/houdiniXX.X folder.
Example: G:/HoudiniPackages/FLOPs

Step 2 – Load the package
Copy the file FLOPs.json into your Houdini preferences packages folder.
Default Windows path:
C:/Users/<YourName>/Documents/houdini20.5/packages

Edit the JSON file to set the "FLOPs" variable to the directory used in Step 1.
Example:

jsonKopierenBearbeiten{
    "path": "$FLOPs",
    "load_package_once": true,
    "env": [
        {
            "FLOPs": "G:/HoudiniPackages/FLOPs"
        }
    ]
}

Step 3 – Use FLOPs
Restart Houdini. Create a Geometry Container, enter it, press Tab, and look for the “FLOPs” submenu. If visible, the installation succeeded. To get started, drop down a FLOPs Configure Simple Flower node.

Licensing and caution

FLOPs is provided as is, without any warranty. The developer explicitly disclaims liability for damages arising from its use. As with any new production tool, Digital Production recommends testing FLOPs thoroughly in a controlled environment before deploying it into active projects.

Bela Beier Author