I am wondering if any of you guys using houdini would advice against changing some houdini hotkeys to speed up workflow ? when I use either xsi or maya, I have a set of keyboard shortcuts that help me go faster when modeling (without clicking every time on a menu, hotbox, icon... etc) I like using hotkeys because for me its faster and I have optimized my workflow in that manner, so I rarely rely on any button on the modeling side of things. I know this is counter productive for other stuff... (like when a td comes to help you and does not understand your setup... yes admit that is somehow annoying sometimes!). But for me the pros overcome by far the cons, at least in my experience. So as I am new to houdini and learning its polymodeling tools, I can t help but notice that going to click buttons on the polygon tab is slowing me down. I do like the "tab" menu, but even that is slower than simply using hotkeys (ex: insert edge loop, bridge, extrude, bevel...etc etc) . I dont mind clicking for anything else, but I do for modeling. so if any of you has an opinion on this, I ll like to know what you think ... (as I ll eventually like to learn other parts of houdini...for.. fx, sims.. I ll like to know if this will have some considerable impact on productivity, or is it something I can probably live with, like I do with maya & xsi...
thanks! -Manu IMDB | Portfolio | Vimeo | Linkedin From: moloney.cia...@gmail.com Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 13:44:49 +0000 Subject: Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Network and hardware are fastest I've used. It's just the nature of the work. Volume data in my case is not very large, only a few Mb per frame. But, e.g. to make useful collision fields from complex geometry often requires a good bit of SOPs pre-processing. I get the impression that much of SOPs is still not especially multithreaded. DOPs is also very slow vs solvers of comparable classes (FumeFX, Exocortex's Bullet, nCloth). But, that's generally OK since you can do so much, much more with DOPs with a very low chance of things failing apart as you scale up. On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Jordi Bares Dominguez <jordiba...@gmail.com> wrote: Is this processing time or hardware time? (disks, network, etc..) Of course saving gigabytes per frame is slow but may be a clever local SSD sync to the main server could do the job to make the process faster? jb On 19 Mar 2015, at 12:56, Ciaran Moloney <moloney.cia...@gmail.com> wrote: I'm loving working with Houdini, but sometimes it's just frustratingly slow. Even with the new VDB tools, converting and caching everything out as volume fields is a real drag. But then again the caching workflow is super-slick. I shudder at the thought of all the time lost to the mysteries of ICE caching. On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Gerbrand Nel <nagv...@gmail.com> wrote: I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I might save the life of a fellow artist. So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I can compete against people straight out of collage. This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced softimage artists here in South Africa. At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all has to happen in maya for me. My brain doesn't work the way maya works. I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to do now, just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks from now, lead to allot of back tracking. At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price tag of Houdini FX. It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if I was one, of only a few houdini artists around. Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these concerns. The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a concern to me. I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with it, than I can with Maya after a year. The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole package works as one. Once you get your head around its fundamentals, doing something new is fun and pretty easy. This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a non destructive open work flow. So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with the whole "there is a script for that" mentality... there is a sop for that G