Houdini 20.5 is adding sculpting nodes+ COPs becoming like Substance Designer

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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That’s totally false. You will use only fraction of the nodes there is. If you are only using it for modeling then you will never touch DOPs .

VOPs is nothing but a visual language for VEX like Blueprint is for C++. Now VEX will give you more control, but you can get away by only using VOPs.

just know the basic concept of Context .

SOPs : Surface Operators , but apart from surface you have Volume Nodes here as well.

if you are into modeling knowing SOPs will be enough with some VOPs.

DOPs: Dynamic Operators or Simulation nodes, which mostly Houdini is famous for.

POPs : Particle Operator, used to be a separate thing, now a part of DOPs

SHOPs: Shader Operators, but since Houdini 16 it is obsolete.

ROPs : Render Operator

CHOPs : Channel Operators , or simply put if you want to animate you will use CHOPs.

VOPs : VEX network as I mentioned before.

COPs : Compositing Operators.

TOPs/PDG : Task Operators. To automate some stuff, but many artist will see no reason to use TOPs.

LOPs: Layout operators. Solaris. mainly to modify USD data.

To know Houdini at the fundamental level , just have the knowledge of Geometry & Data

Geometry Attributes : There are only 3 ( you can say 4) attributes to look for
1. Points 2. Vertices (similar to Points, but there is some difference) 3. Primitives ( Equivalent to Face) 4. Edge ( in Houdini Edge is not that important)

Data Types :

  1. Float: A number that allows decimal value
  2. Integer: Numbers without any decimal value
  3. String : Non numerical value, mainly words
  4. Vector : A collection of 3 numerical values

That is the fundamentals.

actually imo Houdini’s node system is much more clear compared to blender’s geometry or shader nodes , mainly because when you are dealing with nodes you are having a separate parameter windows which doesn’t clutter your node tree & you will have clear visual of what you are going to do.

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Sidefx can’t keep the current pricing structure going forward. They have to lower the prices or get beaten out by Blender. Yes there is a free version with wmark or the indie version but those are not going to be enough to beat Blender in the long run. I used Houdini for many years.

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I don’t think it’s totally false.
As you just proved is VERY technical, in zbrush you don’t need to know the difference between float and vector to be able to sculpt.
Houdini is a node based software, everything rotate around it, most of the people struggle with nodes in general.

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Depending on what you are earning & the potential of earning $400 for two years for the indie version which translates to $200 per year isn’t really that much tbh.

Considering your revenue has to be under $100k, $16.5 USD per month for the tools that you are going to make living on is not that much; especially as a business expenses.

You can keep Blender on side for your direct modeling & sculpting tools + Character Animation if you find KineFx complex & wonky.

if not it can be an option for

  1. Great Procedural Modeling tools, nothing come close.

great for Architecture , Jewelry type object that uses lots of pattern, Hard Surface objects & props that needs lots of variation which will take months doing in Maya or Zbrush.

  1. A great terrain generation software, that means no need for any other package like Gaea

  2. Using L-System & Houdini labs you can create all your foliage inside Houdini, so no need for any license of Speedtree.

  3. If you know how to use How to use Vellum Hair & Cloth at SOP level, you can use it for Character clothing & grooming. So no need for any package like Marvelous Designer or Xgen in Maya. It is not going to be as intuitive as Marvelous designer, but the simulation would be much better compared to Marvelous Designer. Also Vellum Hair for Fur & Hair is way better than Xgen.

Blender also can do it to a level, but Houdini’s solution would be much better.

  1. Animation & Rigging: KineFx is making huge strides & if you know how to handle it can rival Maya

  2. Simulation : Muscle Simulation, Cloth simulation, Softbody, Fluid, Pyro, Smoke, liquid, RBD, Crowd simulation who can do it as good or better than Houdini? There is no mainstream package that can come close.

Ziva was great for Muscle simulation, but since unity sold it, it won’t remain in Public domain anymore.

  1. Motion Graphics: Comapred to Houdini Cinema 4D is a childs play & will take you another $800 for an anula license + you will need extra for Plug ins.

Even after doing all these things I don’t know how anyone could call Houdini to not be an economical Choice.

Add another $279 for a 3D Coat perpetual license over it (which also comes with a great UV, Retopo & Texture tools), if you consider Blender’s sculpting to not be adequate while Zbrush being costly as it is; you can set up an entire pipeline only based on Blender + 3D Coat + Houdini & Unreal Engine 5 & Two of them are free.

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I think so too, it’s definitely in their radar. One day! The world needs it.

I don’t think they compete. Blender covers a fraction of the procedural things Houdini can do. I see them as complementary: Blender is really good at things Houdini isn’t, and vice versa.

I don’t think it’s false either. It’s complicated. The explanation above didn’t do a good job making it seem easy, to be fair. No one memorizes all the terms as definitions. In general, one learns one of the things Houdini can do as they go. While its node structure can be intimidating, as far as nodes go, Houdini has the best interface to make use of them. It also has great documentation and a lot of tutorials on YT. Still, it is definitely complicated. But one can indeed use it without doing math, and just relying on the high-level nodes they ship it with. It ships with a lot of them and they’re very extensive.

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I’m hoping the extensions platform becomes a repository for high-level node tools to make geonodes more accessible in the same way

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Me too. I’m sure it will. Substance used to have a wonderful repository called Substance Share, pretty similar to the new extensions website. It was amazing and really thriving with node setups. Sadly Adobe closed it last year or so. Having an easy way to share nodes makes all the difference.

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Blender will beat Houdini in the long run by simply being free? The amount of updates from 20 to 20.5 would take Blender years to develop. How would it beat Houdini in the long run? It doesn’t even compete with Houdini in the same area. Blender’s geometry node currently doesn’t even have a bevel node, meanwhile Houdini has a built in One Click Damage node which is 20$ for blender.

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One thing that is important to remember in this conversation is that Houdini updates come not just with changes to the system, like Blender and other software do, but they have entire teams like SideFX Labs who are basically just people making node groups to be shipped with it. So technically big part of updates are just node groups that were possible to do before, but many weren’t using it because they didn’t make those groups themselves.

Houdini needs to do that because shipping entirely node-based software without high-level nodes would be suicide. And Blender, as its becoming more and more node-based is starting to require those.

But how Blender can match development speed of those high-level nodes is by utilizing its immense community power. People are already making and sharing assets as it is, but with centralized marketplace, better handling of assets, easier asset creation & export and etc. it can encourage more of that, and that is the plan too.

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This is a very good point. SideFX is very smart about this by supporting this initiative which, I believe, was initially independent. There are also independent libraries of tools like AELIB, qLib to name just a few and whole other bunch of tools and nodes peoples are sharing. In that regard Houdini’s community as giving as Blender’s.

I think once Geometry nodes matured a little bit Blender Foundation “borrowed” the idea of SideFX Labs. At least to me it’s very similar and I’m all for it. Because we need higher level tools in Blender for less technical users.

Currently, the one of big issues I see which prevents easy sharing is that there is no good versioning system for your nodes assets. Everything becomes a mess pretty fast when you start heavily rely on nodes assets. I know there is a proposed design for this and I hope it can be solved gracefully. Honestly, I just like how Houdini handles it. It’s very easy to migrate from version to version with your Houdini app as well as do versioning for your HDAs.

Having more higher level nodes do help. Still, learning how Houdini works on low level helps when you face an unconventional task.

Agree, and this is very smart move on BF to utilize this. Houdini, as a commercial software, probably couldn’t do such a move.

But in my opinion Blender and Houdini aren’t competing for the same artists. Yet. I feel like Houdini and Blender are burning the same candle but from different ends. As @scopelma mentioned above Blender and Houdini are very complementary to each other right now.

I have a strong pipeline with those two tools and it’s also easier to find high paying jobs with Houdini at the moment.

In my opinion, Blender is more of a threat to Cinema 4D than Houdini in the coming years. Houdini is really on the bleeding edge of technologies and adopting latest things. It’s both a curse and a blessing :smiley: .

I am planning to use both for the forceable future.

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LOL! Poor baby’s…

So they do comping only in AE I guess then?
Don’t show them Nuke, or Fusion… The horror!! :scream: :laughing:

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Houdini and Blender remain exciting to watch in terms of development, because the respective teams are still working for better tools and algorithms rather than transitioning everything to “Prompt hunt simulators” using AI instead (which in turn will destroy your ability to remain creative because technically you are not actually making things anymore).

It is a major reason why the New Technologies thread on this forum wound up falling flat, most R&D has devolved into the same buzzwords being thrown around everywhere.

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That’s the perk that comes with being independent (and the Blender Foundation and SideFX are probably some of the last standing independent 3d entities): less pressure to mindlessly follow fads.

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A little off topic, but there’s still a freely accessible site for Substance texture files: https://substance3d.adobe.com/community-assets

So yes, with luck the new Blender Extensions will grow to be much the same for GeoNode and Shader Node groups.

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Instead its the opposite. Houdini is trailblazing hard and nobody can keep up with it (even the users have a hard time to keep up with it).
I personally can’t wait to play around with the new mpm solver.

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@Sayantan-Banerjee @scopelma You guys are talking about the current dynamics, that is not my point. What these tools can do now doesn’t matter at all. As AI tools are converging more and more into the production tools some of those epic Houdini features might become irrelevant. Blender is just going to make life harder for other DCC software companies, because it is hard to compete with a free toolset that can do most of what they offer. And this race will get harder and harder for those companies as time goes by.

Houdini is a great tool with a lot of pro features, I love it and as I mentioned it I used it for many years, but the point is that the market dynamics are changing fast and the iterative feature integration is not going to cut it.

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Being free is not enough to beat Houdini, obviously, but being the best in the class is not a guarantee for survival either. My point is that SideFX might win the feature set war as a pyrrhic victory, basically depleting all resources along the way.

Almost %70 of Hollywood VFX workers are out of job now. Do you think those studios keep paying for the seats that do not exist? My main point was that SideFX has to pull those prices down, really down. Blender won’t kill Houdini, but the pricing of the software might because the current market is shrinking.

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70% of VFX workers worldwide, or just those in Hollywood?

I mean - there does come a point that one might not be willing to pay someone Cali rates, if an artist in Georgia or Toronto can do the same work, and can charge less because their rent on a 1 BR apt isn’t $6500/mo.

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There is, but they deleted years of precious nodes in the process (and their official forum too). With some luck, though, one can find some of those nodes in their official Discord.

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