Houdini Apprentice

Side Effects Software is offering a program called Houdini Apprentice for free. I tried out the 64 bit version for Ubuntu 7.10 on Ubuntu 8.04. Initially it had some GUI problems but a quick search of the forums helped by suggesting a change to the threading for the interface. The windowing still seems a bit unstable with the refreshes sometimes, but it is usable now. My friend and I tried to render an animation on the dual core machine and it did well relative to a pc with a single core processor.