I've got to say I'm puzzled by the threats to drop AD products to move to Houdini if they were to discontinue Soft.
Houdini is a great software for a number of reasons, and has a broad range of applications, not to mention probably the most open and solid approach to assets out there. I do keep eyes on it regularly, every release, and I used it in the past for more than a handful of shots. That said, do the people making these threats work on a relatively narrow type of shots? Because there is much where Houdini simply can't hold onto a market, not in terms of dialogue with the client base (which is somewhat narrowly focused for the largest part), nor in terms of features and actual turn around time for a task. Character tools in Houdini in example are daunting to put together, and performance, even when you try and squeeze every frame out of it, is simply not there. While I'd probably love the troubleshooting, asset cobbling and technical animation process in Houdini, if I was asked to turn around an animation rig in it, even without considering the sheer amount of tools and API work we layered on top of XSI or Maya, I'd have to literally triple my quotes, and would be very hard pressed finding any competent staff with some domain knowledge to take on it. We all like to say that the application isn't important, skills are portable and so on, and to an extent it's true, but the whole extent of rigging, shaving the development edges off, is largely domain knowledge of the app, and in Houdini's case even more so, because it might be transparent and intuitive for somebody approaching it from the right angle, but it's a very hard software to migrate button pushers to, and still more than a small challenge to find your way through if you come from Max, Maya or Soft. It was simply never taken far along enough the rigging and animation route by enough people for the tools to get there. Even Maya, with its current unbelievably tall stash of broken nuggets and idiosyncrasies, is a much more well rounded tool for that. The shops that tried to have it end to end have -all- tanked (of course not because of Houdini, but it does mean no single client ever pushed them consistently in those regards for longer than a year or two), and if you ask the very, very large number of people around here who had their induction to Houdini in DrD (which also tanked) for things other than FX, the majority I talked to literally said they would turn down a job rather than light a shot in Houdini again (as did anmators from CORE when we took them on for Charlotte's web years ago when I was in RSP). The few who actually enjoyed it tend to be those who had extensive troubleshooting in their responsibilities, or were more than a bit of the technical persuasion. That's the problem I have with this monopoly, and with the competing offers coming out. Like it or not there are TWO truly character and animation capable applications suitable for the mid-sized team and up, and that's Soft and Maya, and it shows that that market is cornered, because it's been stagnating for years. So, go ahead, try to pull together a functional rig and then animate it in Houdini, and let me know how it goes. I did, several times, and while I enjoyed the process, and would like to believe I have the foundations knowledge to deal with a software like H, it's a long hard walk to get things out, with many missing tools in the way. Yes, you can quickly cook up a VOP or a SOP of some description to do many of those things, but then when you're restricting the domain to such a small patch, ICE will smoke the hell out of any other app for such things anyway, so why would I want to use something other than Soft if that was my thing? And on top of that Soft piles up tool after tool and UI for skinning and deformations that, while long uncared for, are still best of breed. And it's a sad statement that Soft's skinning/weighting toolsuite is the best OOTB experience out there, because it's been practically untouched since 1.5.
