Wow.. forgot about this rant :)
It's been about 9 months since I wrote that, and I'm still pretty happy
with houdini.
Only thing I don't like much as a freelancer is Mantra.
Like Jordi said, its probably comparable to Arnold. (I did a fur job a
few months ago, and it was allot faster than Arnold for what we wanted
to do)
Also like Jordi said, you can do some amazing things with mantra, like
distorting uvs with fractals at shader level (this has been blowing my
mind for the last few months)
BUT... I get the feeling Mantra is designed for large productions, where
there is a farm to take the hits.
If you were spoiled by redshift, or octane, be prepared to pull some
hair out.
I render most of my simple jobs through blender (cycles is bloody
awesome!!!), and heavy things with volumes I do in mantra.
This just happened while I was replying to this mail..
https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=42678
Might be worth looking into :)
G
On 02/01/2016 19:27, Tim Leydecker wrote:
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
.
