At SIGGRAPH 99, Side Effects Software will make a handful of major announcements regarding the future of Houdini and the company’s Mantra renderer. In addition to a number of functional enhancements, the company has made significant advances in Houdini’s work flow in Version 4.0. The company has also undertaken some repricing and repackaging initiatives on Mantra as well as an alliance with l.a.-based Cinema Graphics, makers of ShadeTree.

The work-flow changes in Houdini 4.0 are the fruits of an 18-month undertaking known as Project Karma. The project consisted of a Side Effects team working with customers in Canada, l.a. and Japan with the goal of pushing work-flow efficiency to new levels.

‘With Houdini 4.0 we reached the stage where it was time to revisit what the next boost in productivity could be and there was a tremendous opportunity there in revamping the work flow,’ says Richard Hamel, Side Effects marketing and sales director.

The Side Effects team has been working with users to refine work flow to the point where Houdini is as efficient or more efficient than anything in the industry, says Hamel.

The work-flow setup is significantly different in 4.0 than what existing users are familiar with, says Hamel, and the company will take users through the new package at siggraph. The product will go into beta testing in September.

The new version represents a change in the way that animators access the software’s editors for different tasks, like modeling, compositing or particles. ‘We’ve eliminated the need for users to go through a lot of steps to get to the editors – we’ve basically united all the editors,’ says Hamel.

The company has also increased the degree to which the interface can be customized. ‘Not only can users customize and save their own desktops, they can literally put whatever information they want in as many panes as they want. It’s giving more immediate access to animators to the information they want in the way they want to work.’

On the rendering side, with the release of 4.0, Mantra will newly include a shader language called vex (Vector Expression Language). This means that Houdini users can write their own shaders for the renderer, including support for displacement maps.

The deal with Cinema Graphics means that users will also be able to use ShadeTree, a graphical interface for the creation of shaders, to build Mantra shaders.

Also, as of siggraph, purchases of Houdini licences will include five Mantra licences. Mantra can also now be purchased separately at a new price: us$500 ($750). Existing Houdini users will also be privy to the five-Mantra deal for new Houdini 4.0 licences covered by their upgrade plan.