Carbon for Houdini

Plugin available for Houdini®  on Windows and Linux, all builds of 18.5, 19.0 and 19.5

Check out the latest docs here.

In 2014, Carbon made its big screen debut in DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon 2” where it was used for some of the most challenging CFX shots.

Ever since then, Carbon has been used extensively in the VFX industry for a variety of applications, ranging from sails, ropes, chains, plants, to the most demanding Hero cloth and skin simulations for animated and Digi-double simulations.

Most of your favorite blockbuster movies from the past 8 odd years have been relying on Carbon in one way or another.

Here is just a selection of movies using Carbon

 

Carbon for Houdini supports all the features of Carbon for Maya
which you can check out here

 

In addition, Carbon for Houdini supports Carbon Tissue and Carbon Plumage / N-Lattice

click on these videos for more information about Carbon Tissue and Carbon Plumage.

 

Carbon Plumage & N-Lattice
Use these nodes to create plants, fur, and feathers. No matter if you want to use an existing groom, or start fresh, we've got you covered.
Carbon Tissue
Volume based cloths using Tetrahedrons are also supported through the Carbon Tissue node. This can be used for skin, muscles, rope, sponge, foam, etc.

 

The commercial first use of original SIM_CarbonTool plugin was first for the 2014 movie "How to Train Your Dragon 2".

Version 1 of our new Carbon For Houdini plugin was released in March 2022, after undergoing an extensive beta test by ourselves and customers.

No the latest Carbon for Houdini is a SOP based plug-in. We could see no advantages from supporting DOP and that means our customers do not need to pay for the more expensive Houdini FX licenses.

Via the support forum here http://www.numerion-software.com/index.php/forum

Yes we have many users of the original SIM_CarbonTool plugin and we will continue to support them and add features if requested.
The Carbon behaviour is the same, so the same settings should work in both plug-ins. But the architecture is slightly different so you will need to recreate your scene graphs using the Carbon for Houdini SOP nodes and then enter your parameters as they are in SIM_CarbonTool. This is pretty easy as the nodes have the same names and in general the same parameter order in the UI.

The Carbon cache is a simulation cache - this is very different to a geometry cache. A simulation cache allows us to restart the simulation at any valid frame just as though it has simulated up to that frame.

By default, licenses are machine locked. If you are a major studio and require floating evaluation licenses then please make that request via the evaluation sign up form or email evaluation@numerion-software.com

Licenses work for all Carbon For Houdini plugins, i.e. all 18.5 and up. But each license will be specific to your platform, i.e. Windows licenses cannot be used for Linux machine, and vice versa.

Evaluation licenses are valid for 14 days.

Yes.

No.

No.

Tested on Windows 10, 11, and Linux. We expect it to work on Windows 8.1 & 7 (SP1) as well. If you are interested in a version for OSX then please register your interest through the evaluation signup buttons on this page.

The main difference is that Houdini supports tetrahedrons as a native type and so we can expose Carbon Tissue in Houdini. The other difference is that we are supporting Carbon Plumage and N-lattice in Houdini which seems a more natural home for procedural content generation. If you would like to see these features in Maya then let us know - Contact us.

Yes, the Carbon For Houdini plugin uses the same underlying C++ libraries as the Carbon Cloth for Maya plugin. Furthermore, we ensure you have the same examples, documentation and UI available between both plugins to make it as seamless as possible for artists to transition between tools.
Please note that due to the nature of Houdini, such as being able to natively support tetrahedral geometry, there are features which are currently only available in the Carbon For Houdini plugin, but we strive to bring as many of those to Maya as possible.

We are using the same underlying Carbon C++ libraries between both packages, so solver performance is theoretically identical in both packages, but there are obviously slight differences in terms of overhead stemming from Maya and Houdini being different software packages.

Today, you can only move the geometry, and Carbon Cloth Material files, but the goal is to reach a point where you can move all Carbon assets, including their simulation properties, between packages.

Check out the options on this page - Carbon Licenses for Maya and Houdini

Please feel free to Contact us.