Houdini is a high-end 3D animation package developed by Side Effects Software which headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Its main distinction from other packages is that it has been designed as a purely procedural environment.

1. Work Fast, Smart, Flexible. Easily step back and make changes - even late into the production cycle. You can rewire and modify your node networks any way you desire, making it possible to quickly develop and present multiple interations to your team and ultimately to your client.

2. A New Level of Understanding. As your creative decisions get saved into Houdini nodes, you build up a wealth of information that is always at your fingertips. Gain low-level access to your scene making it easy to face both day-to-day tasks and technical challenges with confidence.

3. Take Control of Tools and Assets. Once a solution is in place, you can bundle up your networks into a new node called a Houdini Digital Asset. Encapsulate your favourite workflows into assets then set up an artist-friendly UI for your colleagues. Distribute your custom tools throughout your production and use Houdini's reliable referencing scheme to keep all the assets up-to-date.

Like Maya, Houdini is an open-environment and uses the popular Tcl/Tk scripting language and toolkit (as opposed to the proprietary MEL used in Maya). Houdini also has its own CShell-like scripting language, Hscript. However, any major scripting languages which support socket communication can interface with Houdini. As of version 9, Houdini also offers Python as a substitute to hscript and the original expression language.

Digital assets are generally constructed by connecting sequences of operations (or OPs). This proceduralism has several advantages: it allows users to construct highly detailed geometric or organic objects in comparatively very few steps compared to other packages; it enables and encourages non-linear development; and new operators can be created in terms of existing operators, a flexible alternative to non-procedural scripting often relied on in other packages for customisation. Houdini uses this procedural paradigm throughout: for textures, shaders, particles, "channel data" (data used to drive animation), rendering and compositing.

Key Features:
1. Houdini Nodes and Assets
As an artist and animator, you use your CG tools to bring life to your ideas. Along the way, you make creative decisions that are necessary to achieve your goals. A lot of these decisions involve experimenting and reworking ideas to get them just right. In Houdini, each of these decisions is recorded as a node that is wired up to other nodes. The resulting network provides a blueprint of your creative process and a framework for making revisions.

2. Houdini Modeling
Houdini's modeling tools can be used by modellers to create characters, sets and props or by visual effects artists to give particles and fluids shape and form. For traditional modelers, Houdini provides a robust set of tools that work with a wide variety of geometry types. For visual effects artists, Houdini's node-based workflow makes it easy to set up surfaces that are generated on the fly based on an underlying effect.

3. Houdini Animation
Whether you are bringing characters to life or creating high-powered visual effects, the ability to freely animate anything and everything is critical. Houdini not only lets you animate any parameter but with transition nodes such as switch and blend you can easily animate back and forth between completely different networks. The resulting motion can then be processed through Houdini's procedural motion editing system called CHOPs for even greater control.

4. Houdini Character
From cartoon characters that squash and stretch to hyper-realistic digital creatures, character rigs continue to get more and more sophisticated to meet the growing expectations of audiences. Houdini provides a robust character solution that can be used as part of a visual effect or as a larger animation pipeline.

5. Houdini Lighting
Houdini's lighting workflow provides a flexible and powerful environment for creating lights, building shaders and defining the look of a shot. Light and material shaders are created using Houdini's procedural node-based shader builder featuring dozens of shader operations.

6. Houdini Rendering
At the back-end of any CG project is where you render all your lights, geometry, and effects. With Houdini, you can rely on a robust built-in rendering solution called Mantra or full support for a wide variety of third party rendering options. Whatever route you choose, Houdini is the ideal environment for bringing together your render layers and reliably feeding the farm.

7. Houdini Compositing
While you likely rely on an outside team of compositors to layer effects onto live action plates or tweak render passes, it does not hurt to do a little compositing as part of the lighting and rendering of your shots. With node-based compositors offering the most robust solution when working in production, Houdini's approach carries over well to this area of production.

8. Houdini Particles
From dust to debris to flocks of birds, particles offer a strong foundation on which you can build any effect. Houdini is most famous for its node-based particle workflow that lets you define a set of rules using interactive tools.

9. Houdini Dynamics
Create realistic motion that meets the creative needs of your director using Houdini's integrated dynamics tools. Built so that different solvers can talk to each other, you can simulate using any combination of Rigid Body, Fluid, Cloth and Wire solvers to create boundary-busting effects.

10. Houdini Scripting
Scripting and programming play an important role in setting up production pipelines and tools. With Houdini's node-based workflow and Digital Asset technology many tasks normally reserved for the programming team can now be handled by artists. Beyond that there are a number of robust scripting and programming tools available in Houdini with Python playing a key role.

From cartoon characters that squash and stretch to hyper-realistic digital creatures, character rigs continue to get more and more sophisticated to meet the growing expectations of audiences. Houdini provides a robust character solution that can be used as part of a visual effect or as a larger animation pipeline.

The license of this software is Free Trial Software, you can free download and get a free trial.