5 best plugins for Houdini

Plugins are like a fantastic door, it helps you open the way to extend the functionality of a piece of software. They make your work easier, faster, come alive, and do more than the creators it has managed to so far. In this instance Houdini too. In this article, VFX Rendering is showing you the 5 best plugins for Houdini, you can call them “Engine plugins”. Let’s get started right now!

5 best plugins for Houdini

3Ds Max and Maya

There are two of the best plugins for Houdini. They are the main major players in the game engine market. 3Ds Max and Maya were developed by Autodesk and they are the biggest 3d creation tools.

You can create your nodes in Houdini and package these up into ‘Houdini Digital Assets’ and bring them directly to 3ds Max Maya. ‘Digital Assets’ can be changed at any time, moreover, the results are reflected in the end application. With Digital Assets, you can share them with other artists, who collaborate with you on a project. This is a great thing.

5 best plugins for Houdini - Maya & 3Ds Max
Image source: Side FX

Vray for Houdini

Vray is a rendering software. This software can be plugged into almost all the major pieces of 3D software, including Houdini. Vray was developed by Maxon, and this is an incredibly powerful tool, a robust and realistic render engine that in recent years has become increasingly user-friendly with more streamlined workflows.

This software works off both the CPU, and GPU, and enables you to render all of those beautiful procedural effects that you’ve created in Houdini. It also enables you to link up seamless with other Digital Content Creation applications.

5 best plugins for Houdini - Vray
Image source: V-ray

Unreal Unity

Unreal and Unity work in very much the same way as they do for 3Ds Max and Maya. You can direct links between these two engines and Houdini itself. The means by which the link is made possible is through ‘Houdini Digital Assets’, created directly from Houdini and then imported into Unreal and Unity.

In this way, Houdini ensures that there is a live link between these assets and Houdini to ensure that any amends made to the assets are for all software. You can seamless integration between Houdini and engines with this plugin.

Axiom

Axiom is a sparse GPU-accelerated volumetric fluid solver for computer graphics and visual effects, it makes your work so much easier and fun to set up some smoke, fire, explosions, and pyrotechnics. With Axiom, you can customize your piece and everything for your needs.

Houdini has built-in Pyro tools that enable you to simulate these types of effects, but Axiom is better. If you really want to push the boundaries of what’s possible and if you create these types of effects on most projects.

The great thing about Axiom is it can work with all the major operating systems and takes advantage of GPU to process the calculations. If you have a good graphics card this, therefore, makes it very responsive when running simulations.

5 best plugins for Houdini - Axiom
Image source: Olga Gafarova

MOPS

The last of the best plugins for Houdini, VFX Rendering want to show for you is MOPS. MOPS is a toolkit for motion design and it is a great set of tools that complements Houdini. With these plugins, motion designers and visual effects, artists animate things more easily and intuitively without complex networks of nodes.

MOPS includes controls to duplicate, rotate, bounce, aim, and add falloffs. All these controls can then be added to things within Houdini such as mask multiples. Finally, MOPS is a free, open-source suite of Houdini Digital Assets.

5 best plugins for Houdini - MOPs
Image source: “Redshift is alright” provided by Nick Deboar

VFX Rendering hopes you enjoyed this set of best plugins for Houdini. If you have any questions or want to share all about VFX, animation, visual effects, render farms, 3D Software, Render Engines, or Plugins, please comment below. If you want to join the VFXRendering team please comment.

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Reference source: 3dtotal

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