That makes sense for an FX workflow as every project is essentially unique, but in a production where you churn out a lot of carbon copies or variations of the same content, how well does Houdini’s framework/workflows cater to that? For example, are there mechanisms or abilities to enforce certain ways of working? That’s probably our biggest concern as our content has to be functional, not just look good. To be functional requires certain elements be consistently defined on the assets and the asset structured in particular ways.
One weakness I see so far is the lack of API for hardware shader development. GLSL is there, but it’s slow compared to straight OpenGL. I haven’t looked very deeply, but at a quick glance I don’t see any Direct X support. One thing that would be really useful for the transition guides is more focus on modeling and texturing. Houdini seems to have the basic building blocks, but the rest has to be developed/configured by the user. Matt From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Meng-Yang Lu Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 3:37 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Houdini Weaknesses Yes. It's nodes and expression heavy. And for that same reason it drastically reduces plugin development cause you're essentially programming every time you're in the package. And just like you'd copy and paste snippet of code, you'd do the same but with nodes of a tree. Whenever I feel like I need to do dev work in Maya which is often, I just go to Houdini now. The UI creation is also pretty nifty. You basically have access to all the params, sliders, and widgets you'd normally see in Houdini's default tools. Just a matter of dragging, dropping, and organizing to your heart's content. You can promote params from a lower level to a higher level at anytime, exposing only what you want the artist to see. You can do error checking either through the nodes or through vops/vex. It's got one foot in as a 3D application and 2 feet in as a plug-in development platform. Yes, 3 legged analogies are weird, just like Houdini. But I like it now. -Lu On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 3:17 PM, Matt Lind <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Seems like Houdini is heavy on nodes and expressions to create your work. How much custom plugin development do you have to do with Houdini compared to Softimage, Maya, etc...? Let's define a plugin as something you'd write as a script or C++ lib that gets included in the software as a reusable tool, perhaps providing it's own GUI front end (if applicable) and is responsible enough to do proper error checking (as opposed to a couple line hack script like many artists do). Is there much of an SDK for writing GUI's as front ends for tools? Matt
