migrating to Houdini and loving it!

[Butachan]

loving it so far

Superfluous post I know. But since professionally I have been working on Cinema 4d for the last couple of years and felt I should try something else I decided, after reading from many of you guys, to give it a go at Houdini to maybe use it for work outside the office, and ohhhh it feels sooooo nice to go back to nodes and procedural control!!!!
Don't get me wrong C4D is awesome for motion graphics but being kind of a tech geek going back to play with point, speed,vectors, atributes, etc, etc.... it just feels soo right.

Like I say superfluos post...but I guess just sharing the happiness...

PS: just in case you are wondering...you are right I am not a modeler

[Bullit]

Thanks for feedback , if i can ask if you were/are a C4D user how you ended up here?

[Butachan]

Thanks for feedback , if i can ask if you were/are a C4D user how you ended up here?

If you mean why am I in a Softimage group about Houdini? Long story short: I used to work on Softimage (back since the days of XSI) and fell in love with ICE instantly, move to C4D (office choice, not mine) and now researching how to go back to ICE like environment for more challenging out of the box outside of work tasks....and since AD decided to retire Softimage I came back here to seek advice on what to choose. And for me...Houdini Indie is a no Brainer. Basically I was sharing my own experience just in case others are in the same situation and searching for an ICE alternative.

[Bullit]

Okay and you are welcome .

I am also thinking starting to go Houdini route, i need something to compensate for 3ds Max idiosyncrasies.

[NNois]

+1 ! Here too, i even feel a step further xsi, that's very good. Modeling is good too !
The only thing that's bothering me is the display in the GL viewport, colors of wireframe, highlights, points, lines, all of that feels "bad" and not readable at all (even if you have AO, AA, shadows etc)

[Bullit]

Unfortunately i must say that nothing beats Softimage clean and logical interface. Houdini seems more consistent than Max or Maya but it is also an overload of menus and menus and menus.
That said, if things work there is no crap stuff occurring like scale issues in 3dsmax it is already an improvement.

[Rork]

Just want to add to this with some experiences from the last couple of months.

While still using Softimage for projects, I used Houdini for two (same concept) commercials lately, and am using Maya atm in a very pipeline driven project.

Houdini was chosen because of the amount of particle work involved (think windtunnel stuff) , all modeling was done with Modo and 3DCoat for retopo. Softimage was used for cleanup and preparing for Houdini.
Could the particle work have been done in SI? Probably, but the way Houdini works made it a no-brainer to play with tons of iterations and model changes easily and quickly.
I think there's no other 3D application out there that makes this stuff fun, and making it relatively simple to change stuff.

Despite the higher learning curve, I feel that Houdini is one of the best options for smaller teams that already split up their tasks. With some basic 'pipeline massage' it can mimic a lot of SI's workflow the way we're used to, and add to that.
For freelancers working alone it might be a bit too much as Houdini needs a bit more 'prep work' to start.

And yes, a lot of people feel it's less 'artistic' in some way due to the ICE-like structure, and the amount of UI is intimidating at first.
So the node-based structure 'all over' in Houdini needs some getting used to, as well the fact that some amount of scripting is needed here and there.
But the amount of freedom you get is a eye opener.

The only 'problem' is that Houdini takes a lot more learning time to get productive again, compared to other 3D applications that more or less follow the same 'workflow'.
Switching from Softimage<>Maya<>3DSMax<>C4D<>LW isn't a huge step outside the comfort zone, but Houdini will take some time to get used to.
Another plus is how Houdini handles internal and external data, it's just a breath of fresh air. It's the most mature application in that area, and you can tell Houdini is very much driven by the big players in 3D TVC and film.
Of course it's not all flowers and unicorns, as I feel Houdini can still learn a trick or two regarding shading and rendering. In that area I still feel Houdini is way to cumbersome. Although it got better in H15. I still miss the simple mechanism of SI regarding passes, partitions, groups and overrides. It's partly there in Houdini, but I feel I still have to fight the application too often.
Again, you can throw anything at Houdini, and it keeps working.

The Maya project is another ballgame.
It's ton's of set pieces, characters with XGen hair/fur, alembic datasets and renderscenes with reference files galore.
Maya wouldn't be Maya if at random times stuff breaks, or will go into 'diva mode' and kills your scene altogether.

How people, without a handful of skilled TD's, work on big projects in Maya without jumping out of windows is still a mystery to me. (Luckily, my office has no window....)
I've already handled a crap ton of weird issues (especially rendering related) to grow gray hair even faster as it does now ;-)

And yes, for most of the problems we encountered there's a script (how surprising...), but a lot of areas in Maya just feel abandoned or forgotten.
Stuff like XGen is very nice, but at the core is rooted in Mental Ray and is very hard to maintain between data locations as it is 'absolute path' based.
Move a scene outside the path structure and you're screwed. The necessity to save all files in the .ma structure is mandatory, so you can change data paths with a text editor quickly.
Also, rendering XGen stuff is a pain, especially with animated hair etc.
The same with Maya's assemblies system (external references), the promise is there and powerful, but only works with Mental Ray atm.
And the big promise that is/was Bifrost for anything particle-y etc., well..... it's still not there yet.

For a small studio involved in anything else than tons of motion graphics, the best option when moving forward imho would be Houdini.
Yes, Maya is widespread and lot's of freelancers can jump in quickly, but it needs a ton of attention.
Yes, Houdini will take time to integrate inside the studio, and modelers might want to stick to SI for a while.
Yes, freelance Houdini artists are a bit hard to find atm, but that might change quickly when people are actively moving away from SI.

For myself I'm definitely going to invest more time in 2016 learning H15. First shading en rendering, as this is where my interests/work are/is. And I also want to see how quickly I get get up to speed with some ICE 'translation' workflows. Maybe even create some nice digital asset workflows of my own.


Sorry for the long post:
TL;DR...... Houdini good...... Maya so so... ;-)

[wireframex]

Thanks a lot Rork for your partial advice.
cheers
Phil

[Hirazi Blue]

How people, without a handful of skilled TD's, work on big projects in Maya without jumping out of windows is still a mystery to me. (Luckily, my office has no window....)

[Butachan]

The only 'problem' is that Houdini takes a lot more learning time to get productive again, compared to other 3D applications that more or less follow the same 'workflow'.
Switching from Softimage<>Maya<>3DSMax<>C4D<>LW isn't a huge step outside the comfort zone, but Houdini will take some time to get used to.

First of all let me tell you that your entire post goes into detail about what I have being rationalizing in my selection process, I didn't dare to go too much into the soft itself because I still don't know enough about Houdini to properly judge it. But your post implies that my reasoning (mainly the "workflow" approach) was correct, and that does make me quite happy, since it is exactly that "workflow" what i missed from ICE.

[Mathaeus]

Nevertheless Houdini has some nice points, let's say for pic few posts bellow, when I became tired of waiting the Mantra path tracer to cleanup noise around rendered hair, got idea to spread some VDB around and use volume for all secondary rays. Worked flawlessly, got about ten times faster render. Such operation in Modo belongs, in best case to some static copy, in SI it will be almost the same setup, but who knows what MR will have to say about...

Little problem is that, sometime, H 'has no point' at all - twenty years after I first sow tweak tool ('select and move') in Max, probably I'll have to submit the RFE, asking for behavior of tweak thing in same way as rest of 3d apps on planet. Accidental press of K (key) over parameter field, is taken as expression that can't evaluate, causing a chains or red nodes, or crash. Plain instancing is a sequence of nodes plus special option, together with expression to get multiple objects into instances, while each object need to have a special suffix (literally). My ancient single threaded Syflex is still running circles around newest multi threaded H cloth... I'm afraid 'I'm not modeler' easy spreads in very very long list...

So for now, simply can't imagine to use H with anything with deadline - at least until I'll build my own procedure for every single step of every feature, which, by current tempo will take about five to ten yeas. Or, to just go with approach I found the best in this one year, which is:
1. do not use any kind of view port interaction. Everything possible to model and animate outside H, should be done outside H.
2.always consider another simulator, including Blender
3.always be ready to be slapped in middle of work
4. split scene into smaller, baked ones, if you don't want to wait H for minutes to evaluate
5: use it for small changes over imported stuff, this is what he can do.
6: it's generally stable app, especially VOP - SOP stuff - but not stable with scene opening - at least here, got habit to always open empty scene first, then to open existing one.

Yeah of course I'm slowly and surely going into Max - Maya direction. At least, whatever bad will happen, I won't be alone, that's it.

[NNois]

@Rork
Where exactly do you find H15 less good than SI in regard to shading ?
I've just passed 2 project entirely in houdini and with the ctrl+click in render view, the never hanging mantra, parameters, material overides, vops network and of course the new principled shader are a joy to work with !

Yes the vop network view isn't as clear as an ice tree but, hey, we could assign different materials to the same cloned alembic packed geo and overide them without even loading the files !! Well, that's way ahead of what i could dream off !

[Mathaeus]

Render pass override is missing, if I'm correct - or at least I don't know fast way for that. Max can do that, well to some extent. Also it's not clear what can be assigned as individual property, what can not - for example, in time of V14 or v13 (didn't tried in 15, have to admit), been able to add different sampling to object through parameter interface, or directly in VOP, but didn't worked. Later, found on forums how it's not possible without coding.
Also, parameters windows of Mantra surface or Principled, are looking like toys - only one texture allowed, no UV repeat from this place - while when diving into network, it shows a tons of nodes. Imho SI and Maya offers much better balance - if you want, you can do a lot in SI (and Maya) directly from PPG, while network still isn't that huge mass. Personally, my option in H is to start from scratch, killing all possible OGl connections and adding only what I need in VOP - but yeah, it's yet another one I wouldn't like to see into everyday work.

And of course, I don't see SI style of multiple edit of shader parameters, when they are not exposed on top of VOP (select one MIA in SI, add a bunch of MIAs to selection, adjust reflection weight for all at once).

P.S. - also, for app who pretends to go into game dev - non existant control for all textures used, no artist friendly control here (I don't talking about me, here). Let's say someone wants to replace a hundred of pngs by hundred of tifs - in SI that's plain search and replace in external files manager, max has a viewers (and tons of free scripts all around). In H, someone has to script these, imho basic things.

[NNois]

And of course, I don't see SI style of multiple edit of shader parameters, when they are not exposed on top of VOP (select one MIA in SI, add a bunch of MIAs to selection, adjust reflection weight for all at once).

Of course you can do that !
... if you use a network editor in tree mode you can multi select.
I don't know why but the tree view doesn't allow multi selection but, if you use the network view, in list view, with the tree mode then you can multi select.
Better, you are presented after the names with a colums view on the right permitting you to do fast switch on visibility locking etc, verrry usefull

[Mathaeus]

And of course, I don't see SI style of multiple edit of shader parameters, when they are not exposed on top of VOP (select one MIA in SI, add a bunch of MIAs to selection, adjust reflection weight for all at once).

Of course you can do that !
.

I don't think so. I said, 'when they are not exposed on top of VOP'. Try to select two parameters *inside* the two different VOPs, lets say in Tree View. First and general probem is that someone has to 'dive into' shader, while into SI, shaders are directly exposed.

[NNois]

And of course, I don't see SI style of multiple edit of shader parameters, when they are not exposed on top of VOP (select one MIA in SI, add a bunch of MIAs to selection, adjust reflection weight for all at once).

Of course you can do that !
.

I don't think so. I said, 'when they are not exposed on top of VOP'. Try to select two parameters *inside* the two different VOPs, lets say in Tree View. First and general probem is that someone has to 'dive into' shader, while into SI, shaders are directly exposed.

like that ;-)