PDG

What is PDG?

PROCEDURAL DEPENDENCY GRAPH

PDG is a procedural architecture designed to distribute tasks and manage dependencies to better scale, automate, and analyze content pipelines for movies, TV, gaming, advertising, and VR.

The PDG is designed to visually describe these dependencies using nodes that generate actionable task sets and then distribute them to multiple cores on the same machine, in the compute farm, or even in the cloud. PDG provides a rich set of inventory nodes to increase productivity and intelligently manage dependencies to minimize change recompilation.

TOPS

Introduction to task operators

TOPs is the PDG technology applied to Houdini. The TOP nodes integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Houdini. This brings the power of PDG to FX workflows, but it's not just limited to FX. Games, Motion Graphics, and other workflows can also benefit, as can technologies like the Houdini Engine.

PIPE TOOLS

Accessing PDG Technology

Houdini and its node-based workflow are often referred to as pipeline-in-a-box. With PDG, you can completely open this box to increase the pipeline of procedures. PDG lets you organize and schedule tasks and then intelligently distribute them to your compute location to work in parallel.

MANAGE

Pipeline Dependencies

The PDG can describe large parts of your pipeline to ensure that assets are loaded, processed, and saved efficiently. Fine-grained dependencies can ensure a minimum of calculation on a given change. TOP nodes can perform several different functions that will replace manual work and scripts that can bog down a complex studio pipeline. You can even configure TOP networks that fetch other TOP networks to create multiple levels of abstraction in your pipeline.

AUTOMATE

Iterations and Variations

A key workflow in PDG is the coinage workflow that allows you to quickly create multiple iterations of a design. This allows you to produce a contact sheet that can be used to evaluate iterations to make the best choice or choose many variations of objects to fill your scene in a rich way.

ENHANCE

Houdini Workflows

Houdini artists can take their work to the next level, with TOP networks enhancing existing workflows, to leverage the compute farm for parallel process geometry networks and dynamic simulations.

INTERACT

with game engines

For Gamedev, Houdini Digital Assets can already be created to work within Game Engines such as Unity or UE4. Now, with PDG, you can set up visual procedural systems that capture the relationships between multiple assets, rather than treating each asset as independent of the others. When a change is made to part of a level, the PDG can find out which terrain tiles, vegetation assets, roads and buildings are affected and ensure that only those are upgraded in parallel without re-cooking the entire level.

MACHINE LEARNING

Data synthesis space search, augmentation, and hyperparameters

Machine learning involves a lot of trial and error with large data sets and a correspondingly large computation to train with those data sets. With PDG, you can synthesize or augment a lot of data to help train Deep Learning systems and experiment with multiple Hyper-parameters in ML models simultaneously.

BUILD

Extensive PDG toolsets

PDG comes with a wide variety of nodes for managing dependencies, loading, downloading, and compressing files, importing data from SQL, JSON, CSV, or XML, scheduling conversations with HQueue, Tractor, or Deadline, and processing Houdini images and assets.

You can also use Python to create custom solutions or write your own TOP nodes to add your application to the mix. This extensibility is one of the key benefits of PDG, as you can make it a true partner for all of your pipeline applications.

System Requirements:

CPU: 1.8 GHz dual core processor

RAM: 2 GB

HDD/SSD: 50 GB of free space on main drive

Operating system: Microsoft Windows 8 32-bit, Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit, and Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit

Resolution: 1024×768