SideFX Houdini 15 it out!

[nodeway]

Something probably nice for long time renders and big studios.

That's very nice if your render crashes. It doesn't take down application with itself (and vice-versa). Like in some other application on letter 'M'.

PS: Mantagora, I mentionned your excellent work, but it is really quite excellent! Kudos!

Hmm... I half understand what you wrote there, but thanks ;)

[Mathaeus]

Something probably nice for long time renders and big studios.

That's very nice if your render crashes. It doesn't take down application with itself (and vice-versa). Like in some other application on letter 'M'.

Cool, but people who started with XSI versions earlier than 5 or 6, already have ctrl+S habit, before *any* render, because of one renderer, also starting with M. That's how you recognize these people . Anyway H Mantra probably never crashed, for me. Beside that displacement/tessellation issues, it's really nice baby. Brightest part of H, imho.

[Werner]

Houdini 15 seems to be more stable than H14. Had allot of issues with nvidia drivers in H14. Before that we tested Maya...had more crashes in a day than what we had in a year with Softimage.

Mathaeus, have you done any testing on fur in H15?

[nodeway]

Cool, but people who started with XSI versions earlier than 5 or 6, already have ctrl+S habit, before *any* render, because of one renderer, also starting with M...

But you can have multiple renders, and none of them will crash Houdini. On top of it, you can kill Houdini and the renders will continue.

... Before that we tested Maya...had more crashes in a day than what we had in a year with Softimage...

Maya is a total crashterfuck. I don't know any other app that crashes so easily. Even Modo, which is not saint, is not as bad.

[Mathaeus]

Mathaeus, have you done any testing on fur in H15?

If you mean Fur SOP together with Mantra Fur Procedural, thing you get from shelf. Left this one early, never liked setup of three - four extra objects, just to get Fur Procedural to work. Also, never had time to play with Hair shelf tools from any H version, can't say anything smart about them.

For pic, used some ICE - like, compact setup, everything in just one Geometry node, rendered directly without Fur Procedural. Used a plain Duplicate SOP to interpolate final hair over guides, together with some custom Attribute VOPs. Worked flawlessly for long hair. Just tried this setup together with new option to run Subdivide SOP over poly curves ( instead of some forth-back workaround), worked fine as well. Can't say about speed, tried only with low sampling.
Didn't tried to get a look of fur/very short hair, yet - which should be quite different ratio, count of hairs vs count of segments, anyway I'd believe I'd be able to go with some compact, direct render from one geometry setup, too.

P.S. for very short fur, wool and such, I think definitively worth to try something like these volumes - even I have only a few general ideas, how to get this in H. They didn't explained it into details.

[NNois]

...On opposite side there are 'steps' where complete element has to meet only some criteria, to be able to be processed later, while next step is able to adapt to previous one. Like mesh of character, getting an envelope - which was, imho, first serious break of old fashion 'keep it procedural from bottom to top', naive idea...

Actually, much of the people in 3d, talk about character an film work, which is NOT at all what everybody is doing.

3D domain is wide, very wide. In my job I have a little look at it because I jump every time between tv work, corporate work, ad work.
I assure you, I use proceduralism TOP TO BOTTOM every days and Houdini and Soft are a major step in the right direction, we can use and reuse steps already done, iterate it etc. And That till the day before the deadline.

In real world, this is NOT a naive idea at all ;-)

[Mathaeus]

...On opposite side there are 'steps' where complete element has to meet only some criteria, to be able to be processed later, while next step is able to adapt to previous one. Like mesh of character, getting an envelope - which was, imho, first serious break of old fashion 'keep it procedural from bottom to top', naive idea...

Actually, much of the people in 3d, talk about character an film work, which is NOT at all what everybody is doing.

3D domain is wide, very wide. In my job I have a little look at it because I jump every time between tv work, corporate work, ad work.
I assure you, I use proceduralism TOP TO BOTTOM every days and Houdini and Soft are a major step in the right direction, we can use and reuse steps already done, iterate it etc. And That till the day before the deadline.

In real world, this is NOT a naive idea at all ;-)

I think I feel misunderstanding - well it seems to be destiny of all great ideas, in first time I'm ready to hold this burden, in order to liberate the all 3d people, whatever they are doing
Now seriously, if this 'theory' is applied to creation of houses, roads, walls and such - it will say that any packing / distribution algorithm is better option, than plain derivative of curves used as start point, as someone will probably do in typical railroad tutorial. As it is able to adapt to previous stage, instead of being just a derivative.
Let's call it 'multi directional proceduralism'.

[NNois]

any packing / distribution algorithm is better option, than plain derivative of curves used as start point, as someone will probably do in typical railroad tutorial. As it is able to adapt to previous stage, instead of being just a derivative.

True!
But again, houses/roads/walls/creature/humans represent only a small portion of what 3d software be used to ;-)

Anyway, i'm really happy to see how users are considered @Sidefx and the positive vibes they put in their software. I'm really proud too by starting learning Houdini because I feel a real plus in everyday work, I don't feel any "castration" compared to Softimage ;-) and that's great.

Sure there are things in and there that i don't feel "right" but nothing at all that i could qualify as crap and IMO that's a difference with MAYA/3DS/MODO.

[Werner]

[nodeway]

This comes to my mind when I'm watching it:
591,217 Tetrahedros goes splat, splat, splat
splat, splat, splat
splat, splat, splat

;)

[Werner]

'Add High Quality Textures to your Houdini Projects'

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option= ... Itemid=421

[Bullit]

That sim looks very good but they need to put the time it needed to run and hardware specs for it.

[Werner]

That sim looks very good but they need to put the time it needed to run and hardware specs for it.

It says 105 squabs at 7min per frame for sim, but no hardware specs unfortunately.

[FXDude]

I assume that includes rendering (and not just sim time) no?

[FXDude]

It also reminded me of this ;

[MauricioPC]

This just show how Softimage was always ahead of time.