A very wise person advised me quite a while ago when I was at a crossroads and Soft was still very much alive. I sent an email to Andy Nicholas asking his opinion as I knew The Mill were using Soft and Houdini. Andy described Houdini to me as not so much a 3d application as an operating system for a 3d environment. After spending some serious time with Houdini recently I couldn't think of a more apt description.
As far as I am concerned the animation/rigging war is over and Maya won, not on merit of course…. But that doesn't make much difference when you are looking for a freelance rigger or animator to hit the ground running. So we find ourselves using Soft as an asset assembly tool for lighting/shading/fur/rendering, with effects and lots more from ICE. It has worked brilliantly thanks to Alembic and a few tools we have built on the fly. But more and more I am finding the need for things that Soft cannot do such as fluids, Smoke and destruction or a nasty combination of all of that! When I say Alembic I mean pointcache only, the asset is shaded/fur-groomed/look developed entirely in Soft. We import the assets into a shot and then import animation onto them that is published from Maya. It is a pretty sweet way to work, and lets us turn around commercial jobs in amazing time. It allows us to (once basic rigging has started) parallelise your production and no one sits around waiting for handover. I agree particles are at the moment probably better in ICE, but more from a motion graphics perspective than anything else. So it has effects covered, shading is pretty good too, especially with the addition of the new workflow in HtoA. The way it handles Alembic out of the box is brilliant also. Mantra would probably be my next choice behind Arnold as a renderer also. The tests for me will be instancing compared to the ICE workflow, particularly with Milan Vaseks awesome scatter tools that I depend on so much! And fur, fur looks pretty hard and slow to me right now, when even Softs old fur tools are still pretty amazing. The other biggie for me is Houdini Digital Assets, a really nice way to publish out tools or assets with lots of control. It really is the only App other than Soft that I would trust with referencing in complex assets. I have lots to learn, but I think I am going to put Houdini up as the backbone of the company over the next 18 months or so. Soft will still be there and many jobs will probably still go through that pipe depending what they are. But I am sure I will end up crossing over completely at some point down the track. Cheers, Nick
