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Wow! Thank you SideFX! SideFX provide so many high quality learning material for Houdini! There is no reason not to jump in! SideFX understand their business!
Did I hear a groan…?
ah, right… it’s maya dying.
Still long way to go to be on par with maya for rig and anim, but we’re getting there. I wish we could kill Maya quicker.
Maya is not going anywhere, Houdini is far from user friendly,
how many steps just for a render ?
But where is Maya 2019 ? It’s 6 months late no ? What are they cooking ? Are they going the route of houdini ? Mmmm I wonder how people on subcription feel…
you’re comparing rendering in houdini vs maya, which is a clear win for houdini, especially when you scale up. I can’t stand having a single render globals windows. in houdini you can just have separate nodes with different parameters, different objects and lights, different render settings, in maya you don’t have this flexibility off the shelf. Plus, in houdini you can make use of all the power of houdini, not just the rendering side, this means being in houdini your scenes are much lighter than what they would be in maya and you can do crazy stuff with render passes that would be either impossible or a pain to do in maya.
If anything, we can say that houdini RIG and character ANIMATION are not YET on par with maya. but for rendering it’s not the case.
user friendly? I agree, maybe is easier to create a cube in maya and not having to know what a polygon is, and that’s fine. But I wonder were is the user friendlynes in maya when you have to deal with custom attributes. Also remember maya doesn’t support open polygons, so no polygon curves nor points.
Don’t let me even start on how user friendly maya is on its own node editor.
Oh, do we want to talk about references in maya? what about loading a sequence of objects in separate files?
I don’t use Maya myself, but doesn’t it have Render Layers where you can setup different parameters, objects, and lights, plus different passes per layer, and then send all layers off to render? A YouTube search showed that it does this out of the box.
Max’s State Sets do similar, but is clunky to use and buggy.
i’m not sayng you can’t render layers in maya. I’m saying houdini gives you more flexibility and handles big projects better than maya vanilla.
For example you can’t separate camera motion blur and object motion blur in arnold, in houdini you can. In maya you have to resort to multiverse or something similar to handle properly big scenes, houdini supports packed workflow natively.
To see differences you would need to use it, and see how it’s structured, explaining here is too much of an effort sorry, I’m not good at it.
learning curve is a bit steper at the beginning, but it will pay off.
Jack of all trades master of none. Houdini. Houdini is one of the most complicated app. If it’s not a wrangle node or an expressions you go no where. Have you see the video how to set up clothing. Why.
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/november-thug-vellum-with-sara-rascon/
Just us Marvelous Designer.
Jack of all trades master of none.
During last 5-8 years maya’s share in FX departments all over the world went from 80-90% to 0%. Period. None of major studios use maya/max for fx anymore.
Master of none…? How do you call that then? 😀
“how many steps just for a render ?”
Well…none? Unless you consider regular caching as something unusual?
Otherwise it’s hit’n’go since packed disk primitives are on board.
“Houdini is far from user friendly”
For simple stuff you’re probably right, but when your setup grows and gets more complicated it stays readable and predictable (if you do it right), while maya theoretically hides all the technicalities as you work with it, but when you get to a point where you actually need access to under-the-hood you can spend days figuring out what the hell those spaghetti-node-monsters are doing and what’s the order of operations. Not to mention that changing anything involves getting a Master Degree in mel.
Zorm… Oh dear, do you even understand what and why is going on in that video?
Do you get that with presented (or even more sophisticated) approach you basically setup the whole thing once and you don’t care about model or topology changes? Try setting up a MD cloth to give you full control over properties and constraints and not break everytime things get updated up the pipeline.
Same for nCloth. You think it’s friendly and straightforward? …yeah, until the first notes/changes come in.
Personally I love wrangles. They’re my best friend. At the same time I’ve worked with people who don’t use them at all and produce most beautiful fx I’ve ever seen.
Yes, I’m a funboy. And I know I’m exaggerating, but radical statements require radical response 🙂
Mr Freedom. Houdini is trying to do everything in one package. Nice. But Master of none. If you were going to do one thing and concentrate on that one thing only you’re going to be the best. FumeFX to me, it’s the best better then Houdini. WHY! That’s what they work on all day making it better and better. AND EASY TO US!! VRAY the best easy to USE. USER FRIENDLY!! I tried Houdini PYRO my god. You have to jump from node to node to node to node. You like Houdini that’s all you. You like your wrangle. Wrangle away. I don’t. Now To set things straight they are studio using Maya and Max for FX BIG Studio!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz8cMq-bQro
Man, with all due respect, you’re repeating the same phrase even though I’ve proved it’s completely wrong. I say every MAJOR studio doing high-end fx is Houdini based. Who? (London: MPC, Framestore, ILM, Cinesite — Vancouver/Montreal: ILM, Sony, ImageEngine, Method, DNeg, Animal Logic, Framestore, Rodeo, DD — Australia: Rising Sun, Animal Logic, Munich: Trixter, Rise, Rodeo — even Weta who are generally Maya based use H. for fx).
…and you point me to a somewhat desperate proof that 3dsmax is not dead showing that bollywood and some minor houses use it? (if you believe ilm relies on max for fx more then occasionally you’re wrong).
And why? because it’s easy? Please… I can spot any fume sim right away. Not because they’re bad, but because there’s nothing you can do if you want to go outside the box – that’s why they all look same and are easy recognizable.
And you’re making false statements like: “you have to jump from node to node”. All Pyro settings sit on Pyro node.
To tweak emission you go to emitter node. Generally that’s it.
And to customize your solver (which is simply imposible anywhere else)
you can – and then you jump around the nodes.
ps. funny to read this: “Houdini is trying to do everything in one package”. Tell me what max/maya are trying to do?
Man Really!
When it come down and dirty! TI’S NOT THE TOOL IT THE USER! And how the user knows how to manipulate his or her tools.
Make it easy to use. Better tutorials. I have not seen SideFX make a PYRO Tutorial. Themselves. And understand it. From Start to finish. They have to relay on other entities. All they do click on the shelf tool. And call it done. LOL!
What is your problem.
Your not happy Friday! MR. Freedom
Exactly. When it gets dirty and client asks for something ‘that was never seen before’ it’s the user, who need as much control as possible to get beyond what was initially possible, push the borders and have fun.
…hmm it almost feels like you don’t like Houdini because you were not able to understand how it works. That’s depressing.
Anyways. I wish you a happy New Subscription!
Ya And I hope you happy paying $4500. and 2500 every year.
I actually for freelance work I pay $200.
When I get beyond $100,000 a year I will have to problem paying 2% of my income considering the pace of development and 24/7 technical support.
SO I guess it does not work for me. I make over that amount. I pay $1260 For MAX and MAYA. Entertainment Suite. I’m grandfather in I don’t rent and I get my new license every year. For 1260. Perpetual License Subscription.
Sounds good. Almost. Does this mean you pay half of houdini full-blown license for no tech support, outdated toolset and the possibility to buy plug-ins? ..And you’re jumping between 2 apps.. How convinient.
+plugins. I quess, triples the price?
Depends on what you do of course. If it’s fx (and we’re in Houdini thread) then it’s tons of money. But that’s not even the main issue in my opinion (First: doing fx is quite lucrative; Second: I was using max for 10 years on a contract so I didn’t even care).
My main problem was synchronizing all of this stuff. Every single update of any plugin was terrifying because after that I was expecting one or more of the others to stop interacting with the new version or become incompatible in some way. And that’s totally understandable when 90% of functionality comes from 3rd parties.
It’s funny not so long ago I read on this forums an opinion that “it’s so great that we have so many options to choose from!”
Hmm… what’s so great about that? You have fume which is great for smoke and fire, but can’t do anything else. There’s Phoenix which apart from that can also do water, but results are somewhat cheap. You have max fluids which is great for water alone but also blackboxed and non-customizable… This is ridiculous. Now everybody is waiting for TyFlow which seems fantastic solver-wise but this is just a rewrite/extension of pFlow operators while the core will remain as it was, which means a 20 year old backbone (and that’s almost a plugin within a plugin LOL)
Unfortunately that’s what you get with Autodesk.
Maya today is following the same pattern. Any new functionality is a plugin bought from 3rd party and left to die, so you need a new plugin on top of it. Yeti over MayaFur, Ziva over MayaMuscles. Fume over MayaFluids… Seriously???
cool! so why not use ms paint?!
yeah photoshop is great, but in the end is the user!! the user can certainly paint all those pixel values one by one in paint! it just that iteration times are in the order of ages.
Anyway I agree on their tutorials using the shelves. Unfortunately or fortunately, you have to know what are you doing in houdini. Knowledge is power. No pain no gain.
I think they are trying to use shelves to make houdini more accessible to new users, but make it sounds like “this is how you do it”, instead of saying “this is the starting point” and go deeper. In the end you have to understand wtf is happening in the network to debug it and change it. A bit like with anything, you have to know how a bike works if you want to put the chain back once it falls down.
It’s a balance in the end, between how flexibility you are given and the difficulty to use it.
For example I could say c++ is horrible because it takes ages to master and difficult to debug, and I don’t know nothing about programming… and there are software out there that someone already wrote, so those are better than c++. that’s nonsense. It’s not better or worse, they do different things with different level of knowledge required to use them.
I don’t know c++ so I can only wait for someone that writes a sotware that does what I need. Same with maya, I can only play within a certain range offered by the sotware, if I need more houdini allows me to. and if i need even more i can learn c++ and do what I want. But I don’t complain because I don’t know how to c++.
As a side note: you really need extraordinary imagination to come up with something which can’t be done with VEX in Houdini.
But one thing is for sure: it can be very difficult if you didn’t pay attention in high school. That should be a starting point for anyone considering houdini.
@zom
what the heck are u talking about?