For the first minute or so I thought I WAS watching a Blender demo, radial menus, thumbnails for nodes, dots for arrangement… looks cool though.
I would love to see the quick masking workflow for terrain, texturing, displacement, modifiers and ocean in blender 
maybe as a node with a lasso button which automaticly creates a imagetexture for texturing and a lasso button that does the same for modifiers.
It is interesting to see so many people feature requesting - unlikely to happen. Instead I would encourage you to try and learn Houdini. It’s both free + very affordable indie version for pro use.
Fact of the matter is that no tool is perfect for all jobs. You gain a lot of possibilities with Houdini but in many areas you also sacrifice productivity. Low level control causes massive overhead.
That I personally find houdini and blender extremely complimentary and productive to be used side by side. I am also grateful for development efforts such as Alembic to enable data transfer.
Learn it, you wont regret it.
Can you rig and animate a character (or characters) in Houdini and import to Blender for rendering in Cycles? Can Alembic be used for this? If so, What is the workflow for adding materials to the imported objects?
@ burnin
thanks for the video. Great.
Dude, did you watch the video?
yes, yes and yes.
You just drop a material on an mesh like you would do with any other imported meshes.
It really is easy.
But i’ve never tried it with Blender. Is the alembic integration stable and working? Thats the only important thing.
Dude, that was the question. I don’t know what an alembic import gives me. If it is an object that I can add cycles materials to, then great. I often see alembic discussed in connection with simulations but I am interested in using Houdini to rig and animate characters–possibly crowds but render along with other scene objects in Blender. I gather the Blender alembic importer is not complete amd I don’t think the free apprentice version allows alembic export so I can’t try it out myself. I would buy the indie version if I had a better idea that it was possible.
Shouldn’t be a problem @jr. Other than alembic(which should work well) you also have PC2 and MDD cache, potentially FBX. There’s always a way.
Just imported an animated biped from Houdini via Alembic into Blender and it came out fine.
Animation works, material slots are there, looks good, no problems i can make out so far.
Yay!
I too would like to use Houdini to simulate crowds (of zombies) getting mowed down by automatic rifle fire, with lots of physical stuff, explosions and so on. Seems like its possible now to use Houdini and Blender in a nice working pipeline. Openvdb (smoke,fire) is still a problem, but i am positive that we are getting there.
I wouldn’t use FBX since you then have to import all the rigs too, which makes the whole thing very unstable and expensive. As far as i know Houdini uses the GPU for the crowd rigs and i am not sure if Blender can handle more than 100 rigs. If you use alembic its not a problem since its converted to point cache.
1 character, 100 frames animation = 4 MB
Great news. Thanks for giving it a try. This looks like a promising combination.
I’m personally not a big fan of using Nodes for everything. I tried modeling in Houdini, but it took way to long to model using nodes. Nodes are just not a fluid way to be an artist. Rigging, FX, Layout, materials makes sense with nodes, but those can be considered TD task.
Amen Brother
The good thing is, you don’t have to use nodes when modeling in Houdini if you don’t want to. You can model just fine without them as in any other app destructively. You just won’t be able to go back and adjust certain aspects of the model.
Here’s an interesting video showing how to model a crystal. Seems technical but is really powerful if you know what you’re doing. The best thing is, everything is parametric so if you don’t like a certain aspect of the model, you can go back and adjust just that aspect without starting from scratch: https://vimeo.com/205629784
If we had nodes for things like Modifiers and Particles (modeled after the way Cycles does things), they would see a massive increase in power while preventing things from getting too technical (unless you want to that is). I don’t think they will be quite as technical as the Crystal video just posted (good luck trying to make something like a character that way).
The thing about Everything Nodes is that you won’t have to use them, all of the regular tools will still be there (but those who need non-destructive solutions will find a much larger set of possibilities).
For what Houdini does well, Nodes makes a lot of sense. But I do agree, Blender is not Houdini, and Houdini is fairly specialized to VFX. Sure you CAN use it as a general purpose 3D application, but I don’t know anyone who uses it this way. Modelling in Houdini is great for things that you need a lot of with variation in each. For that sort of thing the foresight that procedural modelling offers is really powerful.
But when all you need is one stinkin’ object, using Houdini can be a serious pain in the butt, and almost everyone I know uses another 3d modeller for this sort of thing. Again, yeah, you CAN use Houdini alone, but you’ll end up with a giant spaghetti mess.
If Blender can retain it’s traditional modelling tools along side a node-based toolset, that could be really cool. If this is the vision here, we have to think about how capture geometry in and out of the node system in a way that makes sense that prevents it from going bonkers with changes to input topology.
Technically, I don’t really know if Everything Nodes is literally converting all of Blender to a node-based system or a generic node engine that would allow things like models to simply be modified by nodes.
The way Lukas Tonne was working, it looked more like the latter than the former, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, I thought so too - not unlike Animation Nodes, his prototype was a layer on top instead of a complete nodification of the stuff there already is. Like Shawn said, there’s a lot of thinking to be had here, about how this system would fit within Blender. For instance what about edit mode ? - can we enter edit mode at any point within the graph, or does it stay a “level 1” thing where every node/modifier is applied on top ? From what I know, no software that allows going back in the construction history (maya, max, xsi, houdini) has a magic solution to low level changes breaking upper level stuff - only houdini afaik allows complete control over every component of a mesh and what is applied to it, never collapsing history - unless you deliberately bake the object. Both maya and houdini have a “tweak” node that stores the edits done by hand - ie not by a specialized operator/deformer - I guess that kind of design could work, but I cannot begin to imagine the complexity of such a system, code-wise.