Editing Houdini (software) (section)

==Features==
[[File:Houdini Engine Software.png|thumb|right|Screenshot from Houdini]]
Houdini covers all the major areas of 3D production, including these:

* Modeling – All standard geometry entities including Polygons, (Hierarchical) [[Non-uniform rational B-spline|NURBS]]/[[Bézier Curve]]s/Patches & Trims, [[Metaballs]]
* Animation – Keyframed animation and raw channel manipulation (CHOPs), [[motion capture]] support
* Rigging - proprietary KineFX and APEX systems
* Particles
* Dynamics – [[rigid body dynamics|Rigid Body Dynamics]], [[fluid dynamics|Fluid Dynamics]], Wire Dynamics, [[cloth modeling|Cloth Simulation]], [[Crowd simulation]].
* Lighting – node-based shader authoring, lighting and re-lighting in an IPR viewer
* Rendering – Houdini ships with SideFX's rendering engines Mantra and Karma; Houdini Indie licence and up support 3rd party rendering engines, such as [[RenderMan (software)|Renderman]], Octane, Arnold, Redshift, [[V-Ray|V-ray]], Maxwell(soon).
* Volumetrics – With its native CloudFx and PyroFx toolsets, Houdini can create clouds, smoke and fire simulations.
* Compositing – full compositor of floating-point deep (layered) images.
* Plugin Development – development libraries for user extensibility.

Houdini is an open environment and supports a variety of scripting APIs. [[python (programming language)|Python]] is increasingly the scripting language of choice for the package, and is intended to substitute its original C Shell-like scripting language, [[HScript]]. However, any major scripting languages which support socket communication can interface with Houdini.