Side Effects Software, has announced the immediate release of Houdini 12.5 which offers a wealth of new and enhanced features including Cloud FX , Ocean FX, OpenVDB volume sculpting tools and an optimized lighting and rendering pipeline with built-in support for delayed-load Alembic primitives.
The new Cloud FX tools offer an artist-friendly way of building, sculpting and rendering cloud formations. This workflow utilizes sparse volume sculpting tools created as part of the OpenVDB open source initiative. The integration of these tools is the result of a direct collaboration between DreamWorks Animation and Side Effects Software.
Houdini 12.5 includes an Ocean FX Wave tool which deforms geometry into animated oceanscapes using volumes. You can visualize the results in the viewport and either render the geometry as is or export an animated texture to use as a displacement map. The Ocean FX Wave Tank tool goes even further and lets you generate a FLIP fluid simulation derived from an animated ocean surface. For even more realism, a unified Whitewater solver is available to create spray, foam and churn based on the underlying FLIP fluid sim. A new Mist tool can then be used to further enhance the whitewater effects.
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/61733549[/vimeo]
