Yep, totally agree with what's been said. Houdini tends to be a lot
slower to develop stuff. Even simple tools can be tricky when you
realise that you ideally need to take care of a lot of edge cases to
make your tool work. E.g. what happens if someone supplies packed
primitives instead of regular primitives to your inputs? Or volumes? How
do you give visual feedback? Most people ignore these sorts of issues
when making nodes including SideFX unfortunately.
Actually, error handling and user response is one of my most regular
frustrations. Especially in DOPs where solvers are basically black
boxes. So many times things just don't work but you have no idea why. It
might be that your velocity field needs to be a VBD vector field instead
of 3 x normal volumes called V.x, V.y, and V.z (see POP Advect By
Volumes!). Or maybe you just named your DOP data slightly wrong in one
node. Good luck finding that if you're in a rush, because it generally
won't be shown as an error, and the documentation can be sorely lacking
in the necessary details. I wish there was a mechanism in Houdini for
digital assets to run some sort of test on its inputs to say "I expect
<X>" as I'm sure it would speed up peoples workflow.
Anyway, yes, compounds in XSI were so easy, just define your inputs and
off you go. Houdini's a bit of a mixed bag, it gives you fantastic
control and versatility at the expense of development speed.
With regards to a Softimage library of tools. Great idea. Personally,
I'd recommend doing it as a separate project to QLib as you'll no doubt
want to introduce the Softimage "feel" to the tools that may or may not
sit well with the other tools in QLib. Plus you'll want to have your own
editorial control as to what you think a Softimage artist would want and
collaborate with other Soft'ies. Definitely worth taking a look at
QLib's assets though as you can learn a lot about what's possible.
BTW, for those who haven't seen Houdini Galleries in action, I'd
strongly recommend having a look as a nice fast alternative to having to
build digital assets. Workflow wise, I find them much easier to use than
HDA's.
A
On 28/03/2017 16:17, p...@bustykelp.com wrote:
Yes. I have spent most of my time in VOPs so far and I have to say. I
don’t find it as fun or fast as ICE to get stuff done and I don’t
think its simply because I’m unfamiliar with it. Although of course
that’s true to an extent.
Not suggesting they have to replicate the ICE of doing things, but it
could do with a bit of a user-friendly overhaul. I’m finding that I’m
usually using about 3 times as many nodes to get things done, and
finding it hard to ‘compound’ them because the compounds require a lot
more inputs than in ICE.
Can I save a ‘location’? and read it later? That would help.
I also miss being able to execute lines..
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