Now, to keep that thread alive and because Autodesk is about to gently push people more
and more into the rental this but don´t own that corner.

I´m currently dabbling with the "Apprentice" Houdini 15 version.

Mostly at the single click level of things. Doubleclicking on a node still often drives sweat into my hands...

It´s nice that using Physically based rendering and shaders as well as pretty much anything related to a first testrendering seems well enough balanced to give a pleasing result to start with. No gamma issues.

Hit render, it´ll probably look not too shabby with the defaults already. That helps a lot in the first steps.

But then really getting rid of indirect illumination noise is uhmm, something different thought. That´s where Houdini eats CPU power more than I would have expected actually, indirect bounce cleaning is expensive. Same for getting volumetric stuff noise free. That stuff sure is heavy to calculate and indirect bounce noise seems not too easy to get rid off even with the added controls available in Houdini 15.

Or maybe my threshold for noise is too low. My personal noise threshold I mean.

Coming from Arnold, playing with Houdini´s render settings feels familiar enough, thought.

I like Mantra, even if I find it slow to what I am spoiled with from Redshift3D.

--

In terms of modeling and doing things inside Houdini, I wouldn´t want to miss an external asset creation package to go along with Houdini. Doesn´t matter what, Blender, Modo, Maya, Softimage, Max, etc.

Just something more focused on asset creation or *.abc cache generation to be then pulled into Houdini.

I can see myself using Houdini more and more for both first steps in FX and actual rendering shots.

I like Houdini and the free entry ticket is great, I´ll be upgrading to the Indie soon. Just for playing.

Cheers,

tim








Am 17.03.2015 um 11:11 schrieb Gerbrand Nel:
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


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