Houdini - What's different at school?

Houdini at school isn't all that different from stock Houdini, however there are a couple of things to note.

Color management

Color management is globally configured for all our applications at school and Houdini is no exception. Luckily you don't have to worry about this too much. Textures going into Houdini should already be in ACEScg and your renders will automatically be in ACEScg as well. Sometimes you might have to set some color transforms on textures, for which a reduced list of common options will be available in the regular image nodes.

Render engines

You'll see a big list of Houdini versions when you open the Windows start menu:

By default external render engines are disabled when you open Houdini. In order to use those render engine you'll have to open the correct Houdini version that has the name of the render engine next to it.

Houdini launched using ShotGrid will look at the ShotGrid render engine setting to determine which Renderrender Enginesengines should be enabled when Houdini starts.

Extra tools

Depending on the Houdini version a couple of additional tools are available. The most notable of these are Axiom Solver and Groombear. Pretty much all of our custom Houdini tools are only available when working in our ShotGrid pipeline.