From my experience, it's still relatively slow. A lot of stuff is still single threaded although they've done a lot of work to improve that recently. Be ready to eat up a lot of disk space too, as you'll be caching stuff out all the time to make up for the lack of speed.
Despite what many say about Houdini being great for particles, compared to ICE, the particles workflow is bloody awful. The nodes are super basic which means you have to roll your own out of VOPs, which are then super slow. ICE and Arnold are a dream for instancing, but Houdini drives me insane with slow and flaky workflows (although I probably need to update my knowledge since some of the new features have come out - e.g. packed primitives). Generally in production, expect not to see any significant results out of Houdini artists for the first 70-80% of the job. That can be a real pain for working with needy clients. Once you get past that point though, they'll be able to turn new versions out very quickly. Unfortunately, if it doesn't look good at that point you've got a crap load of work to redo, and it can really bite you in the ass if you don't have a good backup plan. When it comes to commercials, not a lot beats ICE and it's rigid body implementation for speed and ease of use, and I really miss not having that in Houdini. Doing simple stuff in Houdini's DOPs can require an hour of research trying to find out what data you need to modify, and how to actually implement it. I could go on a lot longer, but all I'll say is that you have to be super careful when you decide to throw a job at Houdini. Make sure you have R&D time built in if you haven't done a particular effect before. A On 21 May 2014 at 19:42 Francois Lord <flordli...@gmail.com> wrote: > So... > What are houdini weaknesses? What is missing in Houdini compared to > Softimage? Would you run a company only using Houdini as 3D app? Why not?