Rendering in Houdini allowed them to separate different lighting passes and their motion vectors making it easier to fluently integrate the effects in a real-time scene. Houdini’s ability to render a complete effect as an animated sprite helped Guerrilla Games retain the fine details. In Killzone: Shadow Fall, the effects work got much more ambitious and Houdini played a big part. Houdini has been used to generate a wide range of realistic in-game effects ranging from ocean waves, destruction, cloth simulations, terrain generation and more. In addition to that, they used Houdini’s tool building features by supplying the game artists with small tools to quickly populate the environment, such as adding roads, fences, and so on. Since Mafia III is a large open-world game, it is time-consuming in terms of how much content they had to build, so, they made sure to use Houdini for a number of tasks, for example, they used it to update a large number of items scattered all around the city using point clouds to distribute objects in the massive open-world game, which left more time for designer to focus on more creative tasks. They also used Pyro and FLIP fluids to generate sprite content, these are flipboats of sims that then played on camera facing particles. Mafia 3 is a story-driven open-world game from a studio called Hangar 13, in which, the developers used Houdini primarily for soft body and rigid body simulation, they used it on big set pieces such as towers, and bridges falling down, and they leveraged Houdini’s core competency in dynamics to generate that content.

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