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SideFX announces Houdini 19 (by mistake)


Guest Igor

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3 hours ago, johanal said:

This is what a proper release looks like.   Hopefully this even pushes Blender users to a proper node-based workflow, including an app that can legitimately hold large amounts of data without batting an eye.   With Houdini Indie pricing, it's actually cheaper than Blender + the 10+ add-ons required to make it usable.

That's true

 

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I love Houdini and C4D too.

the messages received yesterday, under my personal point of view, it was not an error but has ben sent voluntary to inform all the community waiting for Blender 3 and juts sow the new C4dR25 that also they are coming with a new big release: SideFx is saying: "dear houdini people, we are arriving in one month with a new release and bla bla bla". And now a lot of people are in stuck waiting them. Has been a commercial action. But I not complaint about this, it is good.

 

In any case, I have some notes on Houdini

1) For me it is not an issue to use VEX after spending years developing in C but, please, VOP for me is a real mess. But we cannot imagine creating something using only code and when you put, for instance, a Pyro on an object it is not easy, for a beginner, to understand what happen. The Spehra pbject is modified with new nodes and other two object are addend on your table. Houdini is powerful but sometime, for me, could be simplify. I agree that also in C4D when you befin to include a lot of tags tags, instances, plane effector plus fileoff (why they continue to call it failoff and not field) ... so C4d too, in some case, it is not easy . In that case the node is more clear especially when you reopen a orpject afetr a while 😄

 

2) I never understood why some node in Houdini has so strange name: polyextrude, polyfill, poly bla bla bla, clip, just for instance. I think that with some user friendly names the product should be more easy to learn and use. Do you want to talk about polydraw? that when you use it the menu is referring to topobuild? a beginner goes in confusion

 

3) A lot of functions are the same but just with some different default parameters. attrbutewramgle and pointwramgls. Are the same, why two?

 

 

4) C4D is very stable where Houdini often crash .. o rbetter enter in "no responding" and you have to kiil it. Blender too sometime need to be kiil .... C4D is fantastic.

 

Unfortunaelly the last R25 version of C4d D it seems a commercial version of Blender 😄

 

 

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11 minutes ago, ClaudioFerroni said:

In any case, I have some notes on Houdini

1) For me it is not an issue to use VEX after spending years developing in C but, please, VOP for me is a real mess. But we cannot imagine creating something using only code and when you put, for instance, a Pyro on an object it is not easy, for a beginner, to understand what happen. The Spehra pbject is modified with new nodes and other two object are addend on your table. Houdini is powerful but sometime, for me, could be simplify. I agree that also in C4D when you befin to include a lot of tags tags, instances, plane effector plus fileoff (why they continue to call it failoff and not field) ... so C4d too, in some case, it is not easy . In that case the node is more clear especially when you reopen a orpject afetr a while

The question is how exactly you simplify such a complexity and power? Unfortunately its hard to say when there is nothing to compare with. 

 

11 minutes ago, ClaudioFerroni said:

2) I never understood why some node in Houdini has so strange name: polyextrude, polyfill, poly bla bla bla, clip, just for instance. I think that with some user friendly names the product should be more easy to learn and use. Do you want to talk about polydraw? that when you use it the menu is referring to topobuild? a beginner goes in confusion

Probably because there are 1000s of nodes and naming all of them properly is not easy at it might seems at first. I assume poly prefix is here so its easier to organize. For example, if you type poly in the search, youll get operators that are working on geometry which in the end makes things easier for people to understand they are related. 

Some tools are the same but with different functionality, so thats why sometimes things can be confusing a bit, but in my case, I dont encounter much confusion at all.

 

11 minutes ago, ClaudioFerroni said:

4) C4D is very stable where Houdini often crash .. o rbetter enter in "no responding" and you have to kiil it. Blender too sometime need to be kiil .... C4D is fantastic.

I guess it depends what you are doing and how much you are doing. I could spend hours modeling without a crash. When it happens, good things is your file gets saved and you are able to open it in the next session from where you crashed. 

 

All in all, for what it offers I find it very very stable and reliable. Again, its hard to judge all of that when no other DCC offers suck a complexity and power to be compared with.

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1 minute ago, jackTheStorm said:

 

Sorry, I'm feeling too many beta testers were not used SN during test.

 

Probably you never open examples from flyingdango ...  several scenes showed assembling such tracks

No I did not, indeed. Would be great to see that in motion, but still, I doubt its douable to that extent.

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13 minutes ago, jackTheStorm said:

Sorry, I'm feeling too many beta testers were not used SN during test.

 

You cant expect all beta testers are even able to test it or have time to test it properly. You need to have some technical background to understand what is going on. If you don't have, you need to invest time to be able to understand it. Question is why would you be doing that if its not production ready?! SN are still work in progress and typical C4D user cant really use them in this state. Things you see around internet are nice but how useful those are, that's the real question. At this point, SN are far more complex than for example Houdini's nodes. I mean, its not even fair to compare those two, you cant really expect Houdini power over night when you know that Houdini is working on nodal system for 30y, lets be honest and simply lower the expectations at this point. I hope they come close but, not Blender or Cinema 4D will come close any time soon. 

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7 hours ago, Igor said:

Its probably never been a better time to at least try it out. SideFX doing more an more to simplify thigs and its doing it well. If everyone is keen to learn nodes, then Houdini is only logical choice due to its simplification of nodal system. Dont forget that SideFX doing nodes for 3 decades now. Its going to take a long time for others to catch up, if ever. 

 

Here is something from me...

 

tracks_test_v1.gif

test_track_anim.gif

 

I am eager to see what kind of modeling improvements they did and also viewport. They are still on OGL, so maybe they also have been preparing DX viewport.

Very cool IGOR! I'm slowly working my way through some vellum/grains tutorials at the moment but you've peaked my interest in their modeling tools. 

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I am now 2 weeks into my Houdini course. Being a complete houdini beginner with an over 30 years of experience in other 3d apps since Amiga times, a couple of observations regarding my experience with it so far:

 

- everything nodes is brilliant for non-destructive modeling. Super fun to scatter stuff, and build things that need to be animated in detail. It's also easy to drive values with other values and parameters.

 

- it feels very clunky to model in it so far. I mean, I am blazing fast in Blender, not too bad in other apps like LightWave and C4D. In Houdini I struggle to do plain polygonal modeling efficiently. The upside is that it is all nodes, of course.


I understand that I am not the only one finding it awkward to model in Houdini, and many artists import from other apps to add sims.

 

- Mantra is S.L.O.W. to render with. Karma is better and more modern, but still somewhat in beta. I could not find a rendered preview viewport a la Cycles using Mantra, but Karma has one. It's a bit of a pain to set up, though, being all about USD.

 

I am planning to install Renderman for both Blender and Houdini, and see how that goes. Someone suggested to me that Renderman works very well with Houdini.

 

- I miss the viewport options and quality of Blender in Houdini. I read the upcoming V17 will have an improved viewport. I certainly hope so - it feels outdated.

 

- simulations are fun. Complicated, but interesting. That's what I am learning Houdini for!

 

The overall GUI feels somewhat antiquated, though.

 

My main concern right now is stability. I have had several crashes and warnings while working on VERY simple scenes. Yesterday during the course I had a simple bouncing ball and I was working in the graph editor. Nothing complex: just two balls bouncing around from left to right, and suddenly the graph editor started to glitch out.

 

Then after a minute or so a straight crash back to the desktop.

 

It's happened 25% of the time that I worked with Houdini so far: 1 in four sessions Houdini either crashes at some point or it displays worrying application error dialogs.

 

Cinema4D and Blender almost NEVER crash. Our instructor explained to us that Houdini features a special "load crashed file" option in the file menu after it crashes. Which, I do admit, is a bit worrying, because the developers seem to expect it to crash!

 

Which makes sense if the user is making complicated sims, but a bunch of bouncing balls should not crash a DCC that easily in my opinion.

 

Anyway, it's quite fun so far. I don't see myself modeling detailed models much in Houdini, unless it is required for a scene. I am unsure whether I want to render in Houdini either, actually. I may just bring in simulations into Blender for rendering and compositing (yes, I am aware Houdini offers a built-in compositor, which I will try out for this course).

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@hvanderwegen
One thing people doing when coming to Houdini for the first time is that they expect to see their usual DCC workflows in motion. Well, if thats the case be ready for disappointment, you aint gonna find it there. Houdini’s  logic is totally different and it will require some time to understand it. I mean its all nodes, what would you expect? But, actually if you know all its capabilities, little tricks you might end up surprised. Watching one guy doing something is not gonna do justice and convince you how brilliant some things are in Houdini. Now, there are some quirks with Houdini for sure, but then, I remind myself it’s all in the nodes, how much things can be different?
 

Me personally like modeling the most, simply because of flexibility and almost endless possibilities. When using best of both worlds, you get pretty powerful hybrid for modeling. If you are interested in how I approach to modeling take a look this video I recorded for one Houdini dev explaining the feature that is missing in the toolset https://we.tl/t-DGboKsYxRe . Just don’t expect super nice tutorial, it was not meant to be that, I’ll record one after H19 release. 🙂

 

If its crashing for you check which version you are using and make sure its production ready which supports Python 2. They generally seems to be much more stable. SideFX have daily builds you can experiment with…

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@Igor I completely agree with you. It is my unfamiliarity with Houdini and its workflow that is holding me back right now.

 

The modeling nodes I actually like a lot - I favour non-destructive modeling as much as I can. And I had a lot of fun with building a world in a matter of minutes with a bunch of nodes - all editable and adjustable along the way.

 

Thanks for the video link! Will watch it later today.

 

PS our instructor is a gal, not a guy, and works in the industry on AAA games and also worked for DreamWorks. Very knowledgeable and experienced - that's why I took this course. The basics I can figure out myself, but I am more interested in higher level workflows in Houdini.

 

Are you working with the Indie version?

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