And how would it fare as a lighting/shading/rendering hub?
I'm very hesitant to move to Maya just for it's lack of a true a pass
system. But then, there's only Houdini and Katana. We could add to the
list Modo and Clarisse (which I'm surprised nobody talked about here
yet) but we need Arnold.
On 21-May-14 15:55, Andy Nicholas wrote:
From my experience, it's still relatively slow. A lot of stuff is still single
threaded although they've done a lot of work to improve that recently. Be ready
to eat up a lot of disk space too, as you'll be caching stuff out all the time
to make up for the lack of speed.
Despite what many say about Houdini being great for particles, compared to ICE,
the particles workflow is bloody awful. The nodes are super basic which means
you have to roll your own out of VOPs, which are then super slow. ICE and Arnold
are a dream for instancing, but Houdini drives me insane with slow and flaky
workflows (although I probably need to update my knowledge since some of the new
features have come out - e.g. packed primitives).
Generally in production, expect not to see any significant results out of
Houdini artists for the first 70-80% of the job. That can be a real pain for
working with needy clients. Once you get past that point though, they'll be able
to turn new versions out very quickly. Unfortunately, if it doesn't look good at
that point you've got a crap load of work to redo, and it can really bite you in
the ass if you don't have a good backup plan.
When it comes to commercials, not a lot beats ICE and it's rigid body
implementation for speed and ease of use, and I really miss not having that in
Houdini. Doing simple stuff in Houdini's DOPs can require an hour of research
trying to find out what data you need to modify, and how to actually implement
it.
I could go on a lot longer, but all I'll say is that you have to be super
careful when you decide to throw a job at Houdini. Make sure you have R&D time
built in if you haven't done a particular effect before.
A
On 21 May 2014 at 19:42 Francois Lord <flordli...@gmail.com> wrote:
So...
What are houdini weaknesses? What is missing in Houdini compared to
Softimage? Would you run a company only using Houdini as 3D app? Why not?
