ICE nodes in houdini?

[TheDutchOracle]

Hi i was trying to defend softimage today at the office, then someone asked a question that i have no answer to.
He asked, if most ICE compounds are based on math, most ICE nodes can be recreated in houdini right? I could not answer his question because i don't have much experience in Houdini like that.

Dows anybody know the correct answer to that question?

(I was under the impression that the VEX system in Houdini is not easy to compare with ICE. But then again, if many of it is based on math, i'g guess the difference lies in what data you can access or something like that?)

[Mathaeus]

(I was under the impression that the VEX system in Houdini is not easy to compare with ICE. But then again, if many of it is based on math, i'g guess the difference lies in what data you can access or something like that?)

afaik, yes, what and how to access and use data. In Houdini, I think there is no universal concept of location and attributes that just wait to be picked, like in SI. I think there is no even ready made ICE Get Closest Location. So, should not be easy to made the custom simple deformer in short time, or whatever similar in Houdini. Their contra argument probably goes against imminent limitations of 'ready-made' ICE approach. Wise guys don't need these things, something like that.... Anyway, it's really, really hard to find some original solution by users on Houdini forums, or even 'misuse'. Nothing to rip off from them
Al the time, only robotic repeating of official advertising, weak implementations of the hell boring evergreens, blind faith into leader. Like XSI forums in times of XSI 4.

Basic math nodes, obviously they are the same every where.

[McNistor]

Al the time, only robotic repeating of official advertising, weak implementations of the hell boring evergreens, blind faith into leader. Like XSI forums in times of XSI 4.

How do you mean?

[luceric]

examples of VOP and ICE tree nodes
http://frenchdog.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/ice-vs-vop/

[Mathaeus]

Al the time, only robotic repeating of official advertising, weak implementations of the hell boring evergreens, blind faith into leader. Like XSI forums in times of XSI 4.

How do you mean?

For small story about this. In times of XSI 4, I was around mocap for games, having some very basic knowledge about Biped in Max. Wanted to do two basic task in XSI, motion re-targeting and basic correction through some animation layer system. Max's biped already has both function. Very limited, but usable, for standards of 2004.
So... in XSI it was possible to do both, using constraints and animation mixer. If someone asked for these things on XSI Base, I was ready to 'defend' the XSI cause, with that constraint and mixer story.
In practice, with my knowledge in 2004, it took me about year or two to be skilled enough to get something better than Max biped.

That is, Houdini is for programmers or those who want to be. If someone is ready to put a year, two or five into this Houdini thing, just to get comparable result to 'normal' 3d app... great. If not, I'd say, better to stay away.

Back to small story, XSI got MOTOR and animation layers later in XSI 5 or 6. While Houdini.. I see literally zero effort to be closer to non-programers, despite the fact, that cheap or free versions are rolling around for, I think, much longer than XSI 4 to 6 period.

[pezetko]

Closest thing in Houdini to ICE are Vop nodes (VopSop). It's not same but you can do similar things in similar (node/math) way like you are used to in ICE.

There is something similar like closest location, it is combination of using XYZ Distance and Primitive Attribute nodes.

So answer is yes, most of ICE thing could be recreated in Houdini as well, or in Thinking Particles.

That article is a little bit outdated, a lot of things in Houdini was rewriten to be multithreaded.

For Softimage there is huge advantage of already made solutions (compounds) to achieve different effects. Big advantage was old forum and database of shared compounds, now on rray.de/xsi
Autodesk screw that up with their forum terribly. That transition to unified forum and killing old site was really bad move from my point of view. You can compare number of compounds that are on AD official pages (database) and numbers that was on old XSI forum or now on rray.de

Houdini does have similar database of solutions you can found on orbolt.com and also a lot of shared scenes and solutions are on official forum and on odforce forum.

From my point of view it's a little bit slower to get similar effect in Houdini than in ICE. But then you hit the roof in ICE while in Houdini it's different, becouse you have whole sky to fly.
Using ICE is nice and quite fast but less scalable then Houdini workflows.

Animation, playback and modeling/uv are much smoother in XSI even if it's not that nonlinear in bigger scale (you have to freeze stack offen to go away bugs and crashes and memory issues).

Our current workflow still use Softimage on most of the stuff and we use Houdini for what it can do best = procedural solutions and heavy simulation. Data transition back to XSI is usually without to much pain with help of alembic/mdd/bin or even sometimes fbx.

Usually I start to sketch the effect in ICE and when things get complicated I transfer that effect into Houdini.