Houdini 16.5 Sneak Peak

Some very nice stuff again :slight_smile:

https://www.sidefx.com/community/houdini-165-sneak-peak/

The contours retopo is looking “familiar” :wink:

Marco

Wow. No one else can even begin to touch their simulation tools. Looks like Softimage ICE holdouts will have a comfortable new home.

One nice thing about Houdini’s development, is that they have a vision and they get it done (evident by all of the improvements they make in each release). The BF can take notes on that idea (as there’s been too many times where promising patches and projects see a halt in their development and are never heard of again).

I like the motion path thing where you can drag the points around.

So much to like in that video. The UV tools in particular look great and the packing algorithm looks amazingly efficient. Note they also added a round edge shader with wear, so let’s hope the awesome work done by Brecht is continued, as it’s such a useful feature for getting things done quickly.

The fluid simulation with air compressibility is incredibly cool and their fluid sim stuff in general seems capable of gobsmacking results. As someone who never touched Houdini for about 10 years, are there any advantages of using something like Realflow vs Houdini? Is Realflow much more specialised and capable for fluid sims?

That motion path tool looks amazing.

Nice improvements and great development pace. To be fair rigging and animation is very hard in there, so it’s good to see they are putting some into it. Happy to see rounded corners (although could probably VEX it) and UV layout(packing) improvements. Hope to see such in Blender also!

What’s best about Houdini is the paradigm of empowering user (with nodes) that allows for potentially infinite possibilities. This differs from off the shelf, easy to use, but very limited and aging one click plugins/solutions. Software should be designed with such paradigms, especially in context of Blender where open source community can be a valuable resource (just look at all the addons).
It’s not all down to Nodes though. It takes a long time for a nodal system to mature and lift limits(e.g all ICE updates, MCG, Mash). Instead with houdini we see more and more relevance to VEX and Python scripting nodes!
From that point of view I do not quite understand why Python based modifiers are a bad idea for Blender? You could create any primitive non destructively(as in max, maya), do simple things like “remove_doubles()”, calculate Curvature of mesh, all sorts of cloning, scattering and instancing, architectural smart objects, mesh distortions etc. There’s really infinite possibilities, most hard to comprehend until such possibility exists.