Houdini, like Maya, Softimage, Modo, Cinema4D, Max, etc… is not perfect and has some flaws.
In my opinion after doing the transition I still miss a few things but these are the key ones - Procedural modelling is useful but the whole non-procedural workflow is in this age very bad, for this reason all Houdini artists either rely on a modeller using whatever that guy likes or simply use a Zbrush + retopology approach. So no biggie but for small things is a pain in the ass. - Viewport is not great, and specially the whole application is not really viewport centric so you can see the tools operate mostly on the network view with some quirky approach to the viewport (for mirroring skeletons is an operation done on the viewport, a non-procedural one) So you will get used like me but won't like it. - Shading is very granular and the examples and setups provided are not very good so once you get it is good but not great yet. The actual implementation of Arnold for Houdini is soooo much user friendly (looks a quite a lot like the render tree to be honest) - Animation tools are not there yet, not too bad but you will miss the mixer and specially the animation layers. I don't particularly like the f-curve interpolation but that is not that big of a deal really. All in all these are my issues with Houdini, the good news is that they are working on these so we may find a first batch of improvements very very soon which will make it easier to access. Regarding some comments about Houdini, it may be a bit slower as the multithreading is not being finished, there were massive improvements on the last versions (some nodes running 2500x faster) so together with new OpenCL support and multithreading on the pipe this problem should be gone (just look at Pyro with a proper K5000 graphic card and you will see what I mean) Regarding talent the truth is that mostly are FXTD and it shows in how they work and the training has been geared towards that as sidefx did want to position themselves there and truly they are untouchable on that area but yes, you needs some good people supporting a bigger team. Regarding artist friendliness, it is simply that it is quite different in approach but like Zbrush, once you pass that point which is not that hard (look at my transition guides here http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2711&Itemid=132 you will see it is pretty similar to XSI. Regarding the learning curve, if you want to get directly into dynamics, particles and vex then be prepared to dive into some more complex stuff, I would recommend to start with the basis and you will feel comfortable quickly. It is very true as Andy pointed that Houdini is very granular (for example, only recently you see flocking as a tool, till now the approach was for you to build it your way) but the attitude is changing fast and you can see Side Effects responding quickly. Regarding Softimage I would put it this way, I still love it and even with the lack of proper muscle deformers, limit with number of objects, awful viewport and pretty bad sdk documentation I still think is the best 3D tool but the problem is that the very clever people at Autodesk has killed it so no very good. As I said, I could set a list of things I don't like about every single particular package, to me the fact that houdini scales massively to super-complex stuff you can't even open in Maya or Softimage plus the fact they have the best support makes me thing is the best bet for my career. Plus you get paid more and do the really nice stuff. ;-) So again, would I configure a studio with Houdini as the only package? well, that is my daily basis and works very very well although of course I have around me a few true experts. Would I set it up with Softimage instead if was still available? oh man, yes… would get both in fact!!! hope that helps. Jordi Bares jordiba...@gmail.com 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?
