SideFX

SideFX is a privately held Canadian company that has built procedural 3D animation and visual effects software since 1987, when Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic founded it, and it works out of offices in Toronto and Santa Monica. Its product is Houdini, a node based application whose procedural model treats a scene as a graph of operations rather than a fixed result, which is the reason Gaussian splats fit it more naturally than they fit most digital content creation tools. A splat set is a point cloud with per point appearance data, and a procedural graph can filter, deform and recombine that data the same way it handles any other point attribute.

Native Gaussian splat support arrived in preview in Houdini 21 and became generally available with the release of Houdini 22 in July 2026. Training runs through PDG and TOPs, so an optimization can be partitioned and parallelised across a render farm the way a simulation wedge already is, and procedural nodes handle cleanup of the resulting splat set. Copernicus rasterization nodes turn a splat cloud into colour and depth for compositing against conventional computer graphics. Splats deform and rig through the existing Bone Deform and Surface Deform SOPs, and Houdini reconstructs Karma rendered imagery back into 3D Gaussian splats, which closes a synthetic to splat loop. Rigging, relighting and reconstruction were the three pillars SideFX framed the release around. Structure from motion is not handled inside Houdini, so initial camera alignment happens elsewhere.

SideFX Labs shipped three dedicated splat nodes in its August 2026 update, moving capabilities that Houdini 22 carried as unnamed prototypes into named tools. Relight GSplats is a LOP that relights splats using standard USD lights and physically based shading, supports image based lighting and optional shadows, and can blend the relit result back against the original captured appearance to preserve reflective materials. Delight GSplats is a SOP that estimates and removes the lighting baked into a capture to recover an approximate diffuse albedo while adapting to splat size. Normals from GSplats is a SOP that reconstructs an underlying surface and transfers the resulting normals back onto the splat points, because splats do not otherwise carry reliable normals. SideFX Labs is free and installs separately from Houdini itself.

Houdini 22 requires Windows 11, an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 11 or later, or one of the supported Linux distributions, and Intel Macs are not supported. SideFX publishes a hard floor of an OpenGL 4.0 compliant graphics card and 12 GB of VRAM or more, warning that less can produce blank windows and corrupted displays on high density or multiple monitors, and it requires OpenCL 1.2 for the GPU accelerated solvers. Karma XPU renders on CPU and NVIDIA OptiX devices only. The minimum processor architecture on Linux and Windows has been x86-64-v3 since Houdini 21, which rules out Intel processors older than Haswell and AMD processors older than Excavator, and 16 GB of system memory is the stated minimum.

Pricing runs across five products. Apprentice is free and non commercial, writes watermarked output and caps render resolution at 1920 by 1080. Indie is a limited commercial subscription at $299 for a year or $449 for two, restricted to three licences per facility. Houdini Core is $1,995 as a perpetual node locked workstation licence or $1,475 as an annual rental, and Houdini FX, which adds direct access to the dynamics nodes rather than only their geometry level wrappers, is $4,495 perpetual or $3,505 annually. Floating licences and Houdini Engine, which runs Houdini digital assets inside other applications, are priced separately.

The third party ecosystem around Houdini predates the native toolset and continues alongside it. GSOPs reached 3.0.0 with Houdini 22 support and splat baking and remains the longest running splat toolkit for the application, houdini-gsplat implements the OpenUSD Gaussian splat schema natively inside Solaris, and Node Connector ships a free modular cleanup HDA for raw splats. Relighting splats inside Houdini began as a proof of concept built on GSOPs in October 2025, roughly nine months before SideFX shipped its own nodes.