Hi Gerbrand, I understand you well! I recently started learning houdini myself. After quite a bit of meditation and evaluating other options,and although everyone around told me that the learning curve was steep, I d decided to give it a try anyway..Its been only 2 months for me using houdini, mostly doing personal R&D stuff, and no production work with this software yet.I am more focused on lookdev/lighting and cg environments, so for me the particular interest I have in houdini (at the moment)is to build procedural assets that I can bring into production (..maya) and that other artists or myself can tweak/modify on the fly. I am of course talking about houdini digital assets. I am also interested in smart scatting methods or any thing that can be usefulwhen creating cg environments and can be kept in procedural way, as long as the end result allows such method to be part of. Talking about houdini itself, I find quite surprising how quickly many things make sense. The sop workflow is simply awesome! ...also just digging insidethe mantra surface and seeing how things are working behind curtains is great! The more I dig on houdini, I also realize that expressions play a big role on many things, so I am trying to familiarize myself with them! I am wondering if any of you guys working in film use houdini for digital asset production, or is it still more of a fx tool for most part? (having said that I do realize that houdini is not and end to end solution or all kinds of assets, but still I feel that there is a lot of stuff that could/can be created using a procedural approach,ex: buildings, concept modeling, snow, rocks, trees, props...etc..) cheers
-Manu IMDB | Portfolio | Vimeo | Linkedin Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 10:51:21 -0700 Subject: Re: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini From: [email protected] To: [email protected] What a beautiful post and watching out for your fellow artists. On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 3:11 AM, Gerbrand Nel <[email protected]> wrote: I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I might save the life of a fellow artist. So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I can compete against people straight out of collage. This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced softimage artists here in South Africa. At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all has to happen in maya for me. My brain doesn't work the way maya works. I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to do now, just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks from now, lead to allot of back tracking. At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price tag of Houdini FX. It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if I was one, of only a few houdini artists around. Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these concerns. The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a concern to me. I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with it, than I can with Maya after a year. The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole package works as one. Once you get your head around its fundamentals, doing something new is fun and pretty easy. This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a non destructive open work flow. So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with the whole "there is a script for that" mentality... there is a sop for that G
