SideFX Software

SideFX Software

Software Development

Toronto, ON 30,513 followers

For over 35 years, SideFX has been providing artists with procedural 3D animation and VFX tools in film, TV and games.

About us

SideFX is a world leader in the development of 3D animation and visual effects software for use in film, commercials and video games. SideFX award-winning Houdini software utilizes a node-based procedural approach which provides digital artists with an unprecedented level of power, flexibility and control. Houdini’s comprehensive feature set includes modeling, rigging, animation, particle effects, dynamics, compositing, integrated rendering, and more. Houdini is available for the Mac OS X, Linux and Windows operating systems.

Website
http://www.sidefx.com
Industry
Software Development
Company size
51-200 employees
Headquarters
Toronto, ON
Type
Privately Held
Founded
1987
Specialties
Procedural 3D Animation and Visual Effects, vfx, visual effects, vfx software, motion graphics, video game development, cg software, and 3d software

Products

Locations

  • Primary

    123 Front Street W

    Toronto, ON M5J 2M2, CA

    Get directions
  • 520 Broadway

    2nd Floor

    Santa Monica, California 90401, US

    Get directions
  • 3 Church Street

    825

    Downtown Core, Central Singapore Community Development Council 49483, SG

    Get directions

Employees at SideFX Software

Updates

  • Boom - a free toolset for powerful explosions from DoubleJump Academy!

    View profile for Urban Bradesko, graphic

    Founder of DoubleJump Academy | ROOOTINE, Be 1.1% Better Every Day |

    And so it comes to an end. But we have one last thing for you... or three! → We are releasing Master Exploder toolkit for free We are releasing Skadoosh pyro helpers for free And we are releasing week 5 of the explosions workshop for free (18+ hours of content) We are releasing this whole week 5 of my ultimate explosions workshop for free in partnership with SideFX. Since starting DoubleJump, our plan was always to release as much free educational content as we could while still keeping the business afloat. SideFX Software Christopher Hebert SideFX has been a huge help on our journey, and I hope we continue growing alongside them. We are also making the MX tools and Skadoosh tools (MASTER EXPLODER) free for everyone to use. Please use them! Studios, freelancers, students—use the tools and give us feedback on how we can improve them and what to add to them in the future. Grab all the goodies on our website. https://lnkd.in/gikyvYUm My wish is that this becomes the industry standard for explosions. Let's make that happen. We embarked on a journey of making explosions better and easier to make, and we will continue doing so. With your help and feedback, we will be able to improve the tools. Just keep in mind Corbin is the sole developer at the moment, so it won't happen overnight (unless someone wants to help out!) I want to thank everyone who took the workshop from the bottom of my heart. If you feel like "oh great, I paid for this now they are giving a whole week and tools away for free," don't worry—we will be packing the workshop with new content as we go, and this is only week 5 out of 11 weeks in the full workshop. Hopefully, we will strike a good balance between free and paid content. We are looking for new instructors to teach! If you have skills and think you want to do something good for the industry, then reach out to me. cheers UB.

  • SideFX Labs continues to embrace contributions from our users, friends, and partners in the Houdini community, incorporating extended workflows that will empower the artists. This year we added or updated integrations with Perforce, Gaea 2.0, RizomUV, and Exoside QuadRemesher 1.3. In Houdini Production Build 20.5.445, we are thrilled to welcome another powerful toolset to the Houdini+Labs ecosystem! ZibraVDB is a VDB compression and real-time playback technology developed by Zibra AI. It can achieve approximately 30~100 times cache size reduction with minimal quality loss, with even higher compression rates planned for future updates. The proprietary output file format, .zibravdb, captures an entire VDB sequence in a single file, which can be loaded back into an application (e.g. Houdini or Unreal Engine), decompressed on the GPU in real time, and played back in the viewport at speeds multiple times faster than native solutions. What the ZibraVDB for Houdini plugin brings is a memory-efficient, high-performance volumetric data pipeline that seamlessly integrates into artists' existing, familiar workflows. It significantly reduces storage costs, improves volumetric data I/O speed, and ultimately makes it easier and more feasible to share working projects and distribute final products featuring high-quality volumetric FX. The compressed VDB files can also be used directly with ZibraVDB for UE, enabling artists to create beautiful, high-fidelity volumetric FX in Houdini, and then render them efficiently as full 3D ray-marched volumes in real-time environments for virtual productions or video games. The Labs team acknowledges and appreciates that there are more people willing to contribute to our open-source repository than we can structurally accommodate at the moment. So we are working on improving our framework for evaluating and integrating external contributions, in the hope that all the necessary legal, technical, maintenance, and marketing details can be ironed out with greater transparency and efficiency in the future. ZibraVDB for Houdini: https://lnkd.in/dfP8JFpW ZibraVDB: https://lnkd.in/dqSQJpCG SideFX Labs: https://lnkd.in/dYqQXsMt

  • Looking to create a biome pipeline? 🌳⛰️ If you are interested in testing out the alpha version of the SideFX Labs biome tools, we have put together a comprehensive demo that provides detailed instructions on how to scatter plants based on real-world biome properties and other environmental factors. This annotated project walks you through the entire suite of alpha biome tools. 🛠️ https://lnkd.in/geX-H9ta

    Intro to Biome Toolset | SideFX Labs

    https://www.youtube.com/

  • Introducing Project Greylight [https://lnkd.in/gcbZaibT]. This demo project comes with a Multi-shot toolkit for use in Solaris. Created by Andreas Weidman, this toolkit is aimed at students, indie artists, and curious studios, Project Greylight provides a professional VFX workflow experience without the requirement of custom pipelines or content management systems. There are 10 tutorial videos included to show how it works.

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  • SideFX Software reposted this

    View profile for Pepe Buendia Rubio, graphic

    Houdini TD Senior at Able&Baker | Software Engineer

    Hello everyone! This is a project that Agustin Gonzalez and I have been developing together. We are excited to introduce a new toolset developed in Houdini, designed specifically for clothing creation or any other fabric using only curves. We all know the traditional way of creating clothes in CGI, which involves a combination of color textures, bump, displacement, among other techniques. The result doesn't always give the desired result; it doesn't react to light as it should or just feels flat. This toolset enables the creation of clothing from a more realistic approach where the fabric is represented by a set of threads intertwining as they would in real life: the process starts from a base geometry (T-pose of the clothes), which will serve as a guide for positioning the fabric on the surface. The toolset has two types of fabric generation: - Weft/Warp based on a bitmap image. - Traditional knitting. It also has width control by image and multi threads generation. After the generation module, we also find the stitching module, which allows us to generate different types of stitches by selecting edges, drawing curves in the geo, drawing curves in UVs or from an image. Additionally, the toolset has a tearing module that makes it possible for us to damage the clothes based on masks or images and a stickers module to add vinyls to the clothes. All modules share information and feed one another for the correct functioning of the tool. Finally, the deformation module enables us to transform the clothing generated in the T-pose, adapting it to the simulated movements of the fabric. The simulation does not need to have the same vertex order as the original geometry with which the garment was generated. The only requirement is that the same UVs are present. This approach allows us to create an asset with multiple pieces of clothing that can interact and collide without intersections or artifacts: the curves will accurately follow the simulation. Regarding deforming simulations, a recurring question from colleagues who have provided feedback during development has been: isn't exporting the cache for all the curves in each frame quite expensive? Indeed it would be. For this we have implemented the curves deformer in Solaris. This way we only have a USD of the curves in T-pose and it is deformed just before rendering. However, this is not the final solution. It is a fix that we have proposed while we continue developing what would be the correct way to proceed: a USD Rendertime Procedural to deform the curves at render time and to avoid suffering slowdowns in Solaris Stage. Lastly, we want to thank Jonathan W Rodegher for sharing with us the asset of André, the protagonist of his short film André Jukebox (Link in comments). It has been of great help to us. In case you want to see it in higher resolution you can find Youtube link in the comments. We hope you like it! #houdini #solaris #usd #cops

  • SideFX Software reposted this

    View profile for Sean Wallitsch, graphic

    Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect - Visual Computing @ AWS

    Today the AWS Deadline Cloud team released support for SideFX Software's Houdini 20.0 and 20.5, Blender 4.2 LTS, and KeyShot 2024.2 in Deadline Cloud’s Service-Managed Fleets. This allows customers who use our managed render service to submit jobs for the latest Houdini, Karma, Blender, and Keyshot versions without having to manage machine images, configure software, or set up a license server. Keyshot 2024.2 runs in our newly released Windows Service-Managed Fleet, bringing all the great ease-of-use features of our existing Linux Service-Managed Fleets to Windows only applications.

    Cloud Render Management – AWS Deadline Cloud – AWS

    Cloud Render Management – AWS Deadline Cloud – AWS

    aws.amazon.com

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Funding

SideFX Software 1 total round

Last Round

Private equity
See more info on crunchbase