No, don't think so, Jordi. Houdini is learnable, even by non-VFX artists, but it requires a lot of hand holding to get comfortable. If you're learning by yourself, it's an uphill climb, especially in because of all the recent massive revamping of the application as documentation is out of date and many workflows require knowledge of how earlier versions of Houdini behaved.
The biggest weakness of Houdini tutorials is lack of structure to teaching it. Every tutorial is it's own little world and there are plenty of people like Rohan showing how to do different things, but nobody ties it into the bigger story arc of how Houdini works in a structured approach so you can progress from novice to expert and tackle your own ideas with aplomb. SideFX provides tutorials to get you out of the box covering basics such as user interface, windows, and basic stuff, but then they just kind of leave you hanging there. There isn't an agreed upon best practices arc in any of the learning content, just a lot of 'that’s just how we've always done it'. Okay....but why? For example, in many videos objects are created and then the instructor dips into the subnetwork of the object to create more objects. See Rohan's videos on making a procedural table. Never is it explained why he must create all the objects in a single subnetwork, or why you cannot connect different objects through the network to create the same result. He also terminates many networks with a 'null' or transform node, but doesn't go into detail explaining why that should be done other than to say that's how he does it and no to worry about the details. Tutorials by others do more or less the same thing leaving many important details on the table without explanation. This leads to other problems. A more expected type tutorial is one by Jeff Lait of SideFX where he covers a single topic of 64 bit computing support through attributes. He focuses on a single narrow concept, but goes to town on all the nuances including explaining how many historical elements of Houdini do not support 64 bit computing unless you know which levers and switches to throw. Then he points out how to do it, in detail. The acquired knowledge and technique is usable in almost any project. I cannot say the same for many other tutorials which are built in very specific manners limiting their benefit. Another element of frustration is how many tools are not single nodes, but are actually networks of nodes bundled as a preset. You try to work with them only to discover there is a parameter value deep in that network that has to be toggled before it behaves to expectation, but it requires decent knowledge of the application to know that, and to know where to look. Ugh. Example: recreating the XSI direction constraint with lag. In XSI you can make the camera follow an object around the scene very easily by applying a direction constraint to the camera, then reducing the blend parameter so it can be allowed to travel within the frame a bit so it's not dead center all the time. Easy peasy. Try this in Houdini and you'll pull your hair out to the point your scalped. While it's straight forward to apply a direction constraint in Houdini, it's not so easy to get the lag to behave like in XSI where you want the target to be able to travel ahead a bit within the frame as desired. You have to have knowledge of CHOPS networks and meddle with FCurves to finesse it further. Even then there's no guarantee you can achieve the same result. If you botch the process of applying the constraint, or need to apply other constraints to the same object, then you get into a mess of CHOPS networks in who knows what state. The display in the network view doesn't make this point obvious as there are no links connecting the CHOPS to the constraint. There's a lot of room for improvement on conveying this relationship. Houdini is a very powerful application, but the training material leaves a lot to be desired and is not nearly as easy as you claim. Matt Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2020 14:30:26 +0000 From: Jordi Bares <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Softimage mailing list: 2019 by the numbers To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List. What kind of work do you do? Or aim to? Houdini is not hard at all unless you want to get into abstract graphics and serious VFX. jb Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2020 18:09:13 +0000 From: Jordi Bares [email protected] Subject: Re: Softimage mailing list: 2019 by the numbers To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List. Check Rohan Dalvi tutorials, some free! https://u9432639.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/click?upn=lIXdN6W56FnEjHCwrBXqOq0HQNpV0huvAGw1zu6Xp8eVQuk2cNZiNFjx2k-2FfTNchg8g1WVJfcto95uwpDUO3LeRlWVqhLYJWC2J4Q1XU7ntpgV-2F5L651KLASszUFYVjpJ8KrfL0fGuXt-2FE1y9fxi8wCOWguliaxTGo2DtMHLacXo94ypixBAy-2FkdIryAU2RbLO3WPQvIv4yrx9qsWD-2BzyZFVZz3KbW76ruE9QWRUYsYWLlePcrZYSYQFO5fvKWuLYNF4ViLLFJw7eokdiAu68HE20MHqU-2Fh7T7y0z5-2FwZ9s9JuV62S0sEtYbuZVgBJ1AxM6kCeyjOQgI3UMZT-2BWxrPaukeq-2Brhfec9I0yRe-2FGRUol69-2B8YxbahL84vdsxjZq_a6oQc7tnfcb0GKvoO27fPkrQ0ATQyF1SDBXJOg7-2FbuRCEyzRdYGDhaOmiNarxjAid92Xq7JaMeEAh1dkbQ2AgLqadUzGl-2FLmuBmxj3Ghkk8a0ch0u-2BPBYMadfjSy-2Fu7agG30fJXyH39uLdtqhJrBA80nlNEctFW4KZdFJ-2BpSg8wohVYM1RWfmLiisIgIu6Q4PecIOQZPICT9EBsy8CLpG8F2Ccos63vahNuCJlwrGEuqBuhS8mngFRwvyYfN0-2Ffl <https://u9432639.ct.sendgrid.net/wf/click?upn=lIXdN6W56FnEjHCwrBXqOq0HQNpV0huvAGw1zu6Xp8eVQuk2cNZiNFjx2k-2FfTNchg8g1WVJfcto95uwpDUO3LeRlWVqhLYJWC2J4Q1XU7ntpgV-2F5L651KLASszUFYVjpJ8KrfL0fGuXt-2FE1y9fxi8wCOWguliaxTGo2DtMHLacXo94ypixBAy-2FkdIryAU2RbLO3WPQvIv4yrx9qsWD-2BzyZFVZz3KbW76ruE9QWRUYsYWLlePcrZYSYQFO5fvKWuLYNF4ViLLFJw7eokdiAu68HE20MHqU-2Fh7T7y0z5-2FwZ9s9JuV62S0sEtYbuZVgBJ1AxM6kCeyjOQgI3UMZT-2BWxrPaukeq-2Brhfec9I0yRe-2FGRUol69-2B8YxbahL84vdsxjZq_a6oQc7tnfcb0GKvoO27fPkrQ0ATQyF1SDBXJOg7-2FbuRCEyzRdYGDhaOmiNarxjAid92Xq7JaMeEAh1dkbQ2AgIzoBB-2BkLmW2xyVqakpY3Q6TBaqAEcGZoIqrl7WULlALah-2FmUCqfT3uzthqeMwti49S9Smd-2F5DhPtFRzWESo4T8uLCAkvVHQyWgFVUZY4LSQsSbNU4Y9-2F-2BV3eKisfEXabnnlEuxONYp-2FeteKEC0fEuO4dv5OcNnmZeHRcENTugLK > He has quite a knack to showcase the many approaches modelling and his lighting and texturing are very valuable lessons on doing it ?the Houdini way? I hope you enjoy these jb ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
