A lot of quality rigging, despite piles of papers trying to sell the public on the contrary, is still manually tweaked. Taking things out of the app where you have the full rig makes authoring a major pain. The most basic example is shapes, doing shapes work in XSI for something like a combination sculpting setup was as easy as it got, especially after ICE. The way data is presented and accessible, the speed on large meshes, the modelling toolkit, it all lent itself to that kind of work in a perfect storm scenario. Doing the same in Maya, comparatively, is beyond painful and requires a pretty big staging effort to separate work and write accessory tools, in Houdini you don't even have a particularly intuitive modelling toolkit, and the handling of large meshes was pretty meh with it (at least up to 12, it seems to be getting better and promising to be getting better again).
The toolkit in general is pretty hard to impossible to give to a modeller with little inclination to learn something like Houdini, while with both Maya and Soft that's not a big challenge. I haven't tried the muscle system in a while, so my comment might be dated to the point of not being valid, but the last time I did it was a bit of a joke. No arbitrary topology for the deformers unless you cloth collided (and the cloth solver was anything but acceptable), only some weak superset of metaballs, rather slow, but at least it was relatively stable, and overall clunky and requiring the lot a lot of micromanagement and a lot of SOPs that often refused to play nicely with the rest of the app. Mind, I haven't found a single commercial muscle system I would use if they paid me for it, which is pretty embarrassing given when we needed one for WWD we got a rather intuitive one done in just a few weeks that worked for over 99% of the show meshes without manual intervention of any sort on the sim, and literally only a dozen mesh fixes across over 800 shots. On top of all that, and again this is pre-14, most pre-13, it's slow. Mind boggingly slow to articulate a decent animation rig. I suspect this last point has been, or is about to be, superseded though since the viewport has been getting some love. The main issue though remains that preparing an asset in Houdini remains a long and involved process which very few people from other departments, some times nobody, can be recruited into, it's born, lives and dies in the hands of TDs. I've always had a soft spot for Houdini, and I'd give my money to SideFX rather than many other companies any day of the year, but as a company their commitment to character work of artistic or hybrid nature has always been patchy (and I don't necessarily blame them for it) and subpar. They have a lot of work to make up for it, but they seem to be slowly doing it while making sure they don't lose their core business with FX and end-to-end clients. I will certainly be looking at H14 as soon as some space for it in the stash of stuff I need and want to do before clears up :) On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez <jordiba...@gmail.com > wrote: > May I ask you to elaborate the “complex character rigging and tuned > deformation”, I may be missing something. > > To start with you have muscles in Houdini which you don’t, let alone FEM > simulations and a universal physics engine to cope with pretty > sophisticated things… > > Certainly it is easier in Softimage and more artist friendly to setup but > I see the rigging side as one very strong point. > > If you are talking about screen space corrections, blend shapes and > advanced contact collision its certainly doable with the toolset. > > :-| > > thx > jb > > > On 16 Jan 2015, at 16:59, Raffaele Fragapane <raffsxsil...@googlemail.com> > wrote: > > It's only true for some definitions of rigging. > If you need proceduralism of course it does spectacularly well, and assets > are simply best of breed in the industry and have been for years, end of > story. > For the hand-crafted complex character rig and tuned deformation kind of > job though, no, it's not nicer than Soft, and I'd be hard pressed to make > an argument for it over Maya (which I consider pretty bottom barreling > already without a ton of custom work). > > Some of the upgrades in H14 and some of the future roadmap do bode well > for that though. > > On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Gerbrand Nel <nagv...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Well I say nicer, because there are allot of toys to play with. >> I think rigging is the part where you need a non destructive procedural >> work flow the most. >> In Maya it feels like you have to make damn sure you are done with step A >> before moving onto step B. >> Houdini is flexible to the point where you become reckless with your work >> flow :) >> Bit more complex when you get started, but worth it. >> The auto rig at the very least doesn't break like the soft one used to in >> 2011 :) >> G >> >> >> On 16/01/2015 14:08, Mirko Jankovic wrote: >> >> Riggin nicer then Soft? >> Will have to check it out then.. In maya rigging and enveloping is huge >> crap and biggest reason that I don't wanna ago back int othat hell at first >> place. >> >> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Gerbrand Nel <nagv...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> After trying to learn maya for about 6 months, learning houdini is a >>> breath of fresh air!! >>> It is not softimage, but I think its the only thing that will come close >>> to the flexibility and power of soft for small studios and freelancers. >>> Once you get into it, It is even more power. >>> I tried learning it about 2 years ago, and gave up because I thought my >>> time would be better spent getting better in soft (the future was still >>> bright back then) >>> Back then it seemed complicated, but after dealing with maya, it feels >>> sooo much friendlier. >>> The way I see it, you get the operator stack, and ice tree, all in one >>> place, the network view >>> So its one thing to learn. >>> In Maya I feel like I have to learn new software every time I do >>> something else. >>> Rigging I found nicer than soft, and the animation editor in houdini >>> feels like a polished version of the soft one. >>> Houdini engine is still blowing my mind.. like it doesn't stop!! >>> At $300 you cannot ignore this as a piece of your pipeline! >>> I'll probably do allot of work in maya because I need to fit into teams >>> of Mayans, but with the houdini engine, I can do the work in the software >>> best suited for it, without forcing the rest of the team to conform. >>> G >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On 16/01/2015 12:08, Mirko Jankovic wrote: >>> >>>> modeling and character riga nd animation wise it is I assume sitill nt >>>> as suser friendly as SI right? >>>> how us ievrall generalist and smalls tudio experience? >>>> SI is more or less out of the box great steramlined solution.. >>>> >>> >>> >> >> > > > -- > Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it > and let them flee like the dogs they are! > > > -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
