My personal experience it's that it's not an artist-friendly tool. It's incredibly powerful, but it requires quite a bit of technical knowledge and the learning curve is steep. I know many artists (modelers, animators, environment artists) that the moment you bring up a graph, they start bleeding from the nose. It's hard to avoid these workflows in Houdini. I'm not sure I would solely re a production in Houdini purely for this aspect. However, complimenting it with a more "traditional" DCC, it'd make up for a killer combo.
Sergio Muciño. Sent from my iPad. > On May 21, 2014, at 3:01 PM, Ed Manning <etmth...@gmail.com> wrote: > > For NYC anyway, the main weakness is the small base of trained artists. Then > there's the fact that most of them are fairly senior TD-types who charge > justifiably high rates, and are either overqualified for most artist-level > assignments, or just not character animators since most of the Houdini > artists I know are focused on FX and sim work (assuming that Houdini's > character animation tools are in fact up to the job). Then there's the > relatively high cost of Houdini itself, the lack of Arnold support, the steep > learning curve that makes it hard to train anyone but a dedicated staff > artist in Houdini... > > Don't misunderstand -- it's an awesomely powerful tool in the right hands; I > wish I had taken the time to learn it years ago. But just as I wouldn't want > to run a woodshop that did all of its work using, say, CNC mills and lathes > instead of hand tools, I wouldn't want to run a small commercial CG shop with > just Houdini. I mean, you *could* do it, and the work could be done at > awesome quality, but it would be pretty strange workflow at times and very > expensive I think. > >
