Learning Houdini...

[Rork]

He guys!

Thanks for that, great stuff!

@Sam: Great intro video, don't be modest ;-)
@Noel: There wasn't a 'SI to Houdini' channel created yet, so thanks for that

Hopefully we can start filling that channel quickly with short 'basic questions when learning a new 3d app' videos, to help out others.

rob

edit: what are people using for screen recordings? Preferably a free app.... I've tried CamStudio, but that doesn't seem very stable

[owei]

Hey guys!

Cool stuff going on..nice!

@sam
Thanks a lot Sam for the video...but would you mind to do some off comment in the future? It´s so much better to follow if someone talks ;)

@NNois
Would you mind to moderate this group/channel on vimeo? Would be better in my eyes, as some people tend to add stuff, that has nothing to do with the subject..if you look at the ICE channel for example..

Thanks for you efforts!!

cheers,
oli

[NNois]

Would you mind to moderate this group/channel on vimeo? Would be better in my eyes, as some people tend to add stuff, that has nothing to do with the subject..if you look at the ICE channel for example..

of course !

[NNois]

I've tried CamStudio, but that doesn't seem very stable

take a look at screenpresso it's free/fast/handy

[owei]

Would you mind to moderate this group/channel on vimeo? Would be better in my eyes, as some people tend to add stuff, that has nothing to do with the subject..if you look at the ICE channel for example..

of course !

Sorry...I see this is different with channels..these are always moderated. I just had this group thingy in mind which is open to everyone..You can put me as mod also ;)

Cheers,
oli

[Rork]

@Nnoise: Thanks for the tip, screenpresso seem pretty decent and not very expensive btw.

And put me on the mod list as well if you like. Just PM me for details and such.

rob

[Firebird]

just as a tipp
For screen capture (if you got a Nvidia card) just use the shadow play function in the geforce experience tools.

[SamHowell]

@owei - I just need to purchase a microphone.

I can recommend geforce experience also. I used it to capture the above tutorial. Very easy and high quality.

[Rork]

Hi guys,

In addition to the unofficial SI Houdini transition Vimeo channel, I created a thread for additional tutorials and info here: Softimage to Houdini transition references

So if you find great info on the web somewhere that can be an addition to the other material, be my guest and post it there.

cheers!

rob

[Mathaeus]

There is no shortage of tutorials and examples for learning the high end simulated side of Houdini. It's everything else that is lacking. It also doesn't help that a good chunk of the online resources are obsolete a lot of the time. I guess that is where we can help each other the most. All of the small things that we take for granted with Softimage suddenly become very frustrating with a new software like Houdini. When I first started I would set up a flip fluid and a pyro simulations and everything would be going great but then I would waste countless hours trying to do something really simple like moving keyframes or constraining transforms.

Yeah, agree. When searching for 'constraint' on Houdini forums, search engine returns hundreds of items related to simulation constraints, and hardly even ten about animation ones. Animation or rigging stuff doesn't like advanced thing, nicely to say, even in v14. "Capture" SOP (a sort of automatic envelope assignment) displays one or two created attributes in node info, it seems it wants bone hierarchy for target, default option for reference pose is frame zero. Reminds me to enveloping tools from 3d Studio for DOS...
But I have to admit, I forgot the idea of turning Houdini into all round app. For now, my strategy is different. First I want to explore, to which level is feasible to push it in parametric-procedural way, using the view port only as display. Later, probably sometime in this year, I think I'll decide what to do with H.
Most likely, I'll add Maya LT thing to my home tools, and do not update Modo. In any case, little bit of Houdini experience helped me, to do not think all the time about Softimage story, also I don't hate Maya anymore - at last not that much . Something is rolling again, that's important...

[Rork]

I'm dabbling a bit in Houdini atm to see if I can replicate some basic terrain + Greenery stuff with ICE.

In addition to several videos on the copy node on the web, I found this nice video on the GoProcedural Vimeo channel about copy and VobSop methods.

What you use in the end will basically come down to the complexity of your copied models, but I already got my PC with 64Gb of RAM to it's knees with the basic copy node... LOL!!
I guess a 200Mb tree model is a tad too much ;-)

Hope this video helps!

p.s. a very ICE like way of working with VobSops start roughly at 18 min. It probably makes it more palatable for people who hate writing expressions all over the place ;-)

[Paulrus]

This is commercial, but if you've never touched Houdini I think it's an excellent introduction:

http://www.lynda.com/Houdini-tutorials/Up-Running-Houdini/182377-2.html


One thing that concerns me with Houdini is the question of both 3rd party as well as community support & tools. I just finished a big project for a live event Nike is putting on and for my part of the job it was a big mix of traditional techniques along with some Mootzoid tools, Gustavo's Motion Tools and other various ICE compounds I've picked up over the years.

I've looked at Orbolt and didn't see much. Is there anything like Rray.de or SI-Community where there are user created compounds, plugins, etc., for Houdini?

-Paul

[Rork]

Hi Paul,

Already added that one here: https://www.si-community.com/forum/v ... =53&t=5731 ;-)

But I haven't find anything yet you're describing. After playing with Houdini a bit, and browsing the web, I got a little bit of a 'Modo feeling' regarding plugins, tools etc.
Not much out there yet, unless it's on Orbolt.

rob

[Mathaeus]

One thing that concerns me with Houdini is the question of both 3rd party as well as community support & tools. I just finished a big project for a live event Nike is putting on and for my part of the job it was a big mix of traditional techniques along with some Mootzoid tools, Gustavo's Motion Tools and other various ICE compounds I've picked up over the years.

I've looked at Orbolt and didn't see much. Is there anything like Rray.de or SI-Community where there are user created compounds, plugins, etc., for Houdini?

-Paul

There are some out of Orbolt, like qlib, or Bullet SOP. Didn't try any of two, yet.
To be fair, Houdini itself comes with impressive number of nodes, Side Effects do not hesitate to improve just every part of Houdini in every new version. Generally, Houdini looks like Softimage with all free ICE nodes, dumped into main distribution - together with some inconsistencies.... Also, I found Houdini a bit easier than ICE, to build the setup from scratch, there's automatism in creating sliders and gradients, and of course a lot of built in nodes.

On flip side, it seems to be essentially harder than in ICE, to create a set of custom tools for use by artist, using only factory nodes. Much more of strict rules in H, what has to be combined with what else. Also, H Sop or DOP node does not allow custom, named input in ICE or Bifrost style (actually, input could carry the custom name, but this is visible only on hover), there's practice of using expressions, code wrangle, too. So, much harder to create something 'visually recognizable' for artist, in 'this-light-gray-half-of-window-tall-node-starting-with-dark-green-input-does-this-or-that', which is, afaik, exactly the way how many people recognizes the particular ICE node. Generally, in Houdini, node tells you only that operator is present, but not what this thing is exactly doing. ICE is not free of this behavior, far away from that, but, afaik, authors always were tried to make things as much more 'visually logical'.
In any case, Houdini authors seems to prefer creating of hard coded nodes, much more than 'compounds' in ICE style.

[Paulrus]

From my very non-technical viewpoint, the way Houdini's nodes work compared to ICE are a big negative. I absolutely love how simple ICE makes it to slap things together. Not just the colors, etc., but how ICE will tell you what a particular input is expecting if you try to connect the wrong type of nodes together. It makes it very easy for just about anyone to put together working trees.

What I really wish would happen is for SideFX to really see what a big opportunity this is and to devote some manpower into doing everything possible to make it easy for Softies to transition to Houdini. (including some kind of trade-in, trade-up pricing)

Maybe they can hire Jordi and make him the Softimage ambassador!

[Mathaeus]

From my very non-technical viewpoint, the way Houdini's nodes work compared to ICE are a big negative. I absolutely love how simple ICE makes it to slap things together. Not just the colors, etc., but how ICE will tell you what a particular input is expecting if you try to connect the wrong type of nodes together. It makes it very easy for just about anyone to put together working trees.

Agree with that. However I'm afraid it won't be easy for them to change this structure. Houdini seems to just be living on 'closed small chunks' in form of VOP or SOP nodes. I hope I'm wrong, here.
Personally, didn't felt in love with their insisting on procedural, non-destructive approach in every case. Sometimes seems to be on border of absurd... For small example, I simply don't know for anything better for getting the 'dominant pivot' in animation, than 'destructive' keying the constrained animation, back to local SRT. Maya does it almost in same way as SI, Blender can do to some extent - but not Houdini. Non-destructive data and info suddenly spreads all around in H, leaving me to searching and calculate by hand.... So, Maya is unavoidable for me ,at least for key framing, in future.