I love the new animation environment look. I do wonder what APEX rigging is. If it’s rigging and animation gets as good as Blenders then I would only use Blender for previs and modeling. I’m excited to see more next week at Houdini HIVE.
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What this shows is that FOSS generally does not become big on its own power, what happens is that it gets lucky when the commercial vendors monopolize, raise prices, and cut R&D to a minimum. Blender is where it is today because Autodesk bought out the competition followed by the other big guys going to subscription (so a lot of users took their money and invested elsewhere).
By nature, when competition is robust and innovative (ie. the industry at large is like this video), FOSS just…can’t. Professionals will never use it and it will only serve as apps. for those who can’t afford to spend much money and want something better than general freeware. If every other DCC app. had this kind of new feature reel, then we would still see the BF holding annual fundraisers while Ton continues to write code to help development along (because it would’ve been unable to gain the mass needed to keep up with development).
Now then, it is possible that Houdini continuing its march will now be enough to lead to declining numbers in the Blender dev. fund, but we have enough momentum now to make it unlikely for it to go back to shoestring levels.
Another example is what is happening to Godot right now, as they now have a similar opportunity to exploit, and they are taking advantage of it. GIMP and LMMS meanwhile have never had such opportunities in their markets and so they remain fairly small compared to the commercial solutions.
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Houdini is still either really expensive for “Perpetual” or subscription for the Indie license, so I don’t think it’s going to have any more impact on Blender then it has already.
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When I was a hardcore C4D user, I slowly started to become less and less impressed with their updates. R14, R15, R16…all seemingly small crap that didn’t have a massive impact on the work I needed to do.
So I switched to Houdini which was less expensive and could do a lot more, and had pretty substantial updates.
Fast forward to now, and this latest Houdini update to me seems chock full of stuff I don’t really need, and lacking in the things I do need. Many of the new “shiny bells and whistles” are things that have been in Blender for years, like a Physical sky and the fake 3D textures, and GPU accelerated volumetric rendering.
I mean, if I needed to have an elephant walk into crashing waves while whales nearby splash around, Houdini is still unbeatable. However I also know the cost of running such a sim, and it’s far too high for most freelancers.
I still think I made the right choice switching to Blender which, IMHO, remains unbeatable in the freelance/small VFX team sector.
What I am seeing from EEVEE Next looks far more exciting than anything I just saw in the H20 video.
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Truth.
If every Blender user was paying $260 (minimum) a year to use it as they do with Houdini, I suspect Blender would have a bit more staff. 
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Are you guys aware that in the Houdini forums there are several people bitching about why isn’t Houdini as good as Blender?
Just sayin’
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I can imagine the threads now…
“We pay HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS a YEAR for this software, and Blender is doing this better for FREE! Wake up!”
(Not saying that blender equals houdini, just that on every forum in the world the users think that every other application does it better than whatever they happen to be using.)
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Honestly it’s not a money issue, but as I mentioned many times before in other threads, Houdini can do incredibly complicated things relatively easily (relatively a key word there), and incredibly simple things in a convoluted and ridiculously complicated way.
While everyone is marveling at these eye-candy type of effects, few are actually stopping to think – how often do I actually need to simulate a helicopter being blown out of the sky with insane realism and physical accuracy?
Don’t know about you guys, but most of the time that I’m being asked to blow something up on a film, the budget only allows for stock 2D elements, and maybe some very basic CG destruction.
Earlier this year I was hired to do some liquid sims for a commercial. Our first go was to use Houdini and run simulations with liquid behaving in different (and not normal) ways. It was a waste of time and resources, and we ended up doing all of the VFX using displacement modifiers in Blender and C4D which ended up being much more art-directable and faster than Houdini.
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I’m not sure if that is true at all as a houdini user for years for game dev, where it shines the most to me is that i can pretty much do anything i want, and if a node doesn’t exist i can simply program a node very simple to do what i need, geomatry node feels like it’s meant for art inside of blender and you can feel it, every time i try to use it for anything substantial it just can’t do anything i need even some super basic stuff.
If you just want to do art in blender and render it fine works as is, but blender is not even 5% of houdini and never will be.
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for the most part that is true, i use houdini for gamedev so my experience is going to be largely different from a VFX artist, and i use blender for poly modeling and game dev related stuff, it does the basics fine but from my perspective all the node stuff is pointless to me and so where i actually want progress to happens is slow as hell, a lot of blenders poly tools are horribly outdated and im starting to feel it even more so when looking at other 3D applications, i guess it’s all relative.
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So it is a money issue alright. 
Houdini is a rich man’s tool and likely overkill for poor man’s needs. That doesn’t really take anything away from it, though, imho.
greetings, Kologe
What I meant is that nobody in the Houdini community is considering Blender because it’s $200/year less expensive. It’s not a factor.
I do often think there is often a grass must always greener sentiment that can pop up.
These apps are not all exactly the same and they often are not necessarily directly competing with each other. I would say Maya mostly has or is seen to have a different niche to say Cinema 4D. Maya high end studio animation and Cinema 4D more generalist stand alone motion graphics and video production. Houdini dominates in very complex 3D VFX. 3DS Max is still a very versatile generalist 3D app but as far as I know still lacks the studio pipeline functionality of Maya or Houdini so is more of a stand alone. Of course they all cross over in many areas but they are also very individule.
Blender for me is hands down the best all round CG content creation platform and app for independent creatives and small teams. If you are working as an independent creator you are not slumming it or loosing out in any way by using Blender. It is so good not because it is ( free ) but because of the way it developed to become so holistic and self contained. It has given Blender an identity and an advantage all it’s own. I think Blender just has to keep getting better at being Blender. It already has it’s own very strong identity, niche and ecosystem and it has also grown into an incredible app.
As for the corporate funding slowing. We are seeing wide spread cuts and redundancies right now across the mainstream industry so this would not be surprising in this current very difficult climate. All funding is great of course but we have got to make sure we keep supporting Blender ourselves to ensure it can improve and thrive on a steady footing.
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The feather system looks impressive. I remember watching a presentation on it a few months ago. iirc individual feather barbs only exist on the GPU so the system never gets too bogged down in data. And it seems pretty flexible, grooming-wise. Feathers never obstruct one another, etc. Super cool.
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I’m a big admirer of Houdini from afar, but because I’m not in VFX and do stylized narrative pieces, I just don’t have use for it. That’s why Houdini is not a competitor to Blender. I simply can’t do what I do in Blender without spending way more time, and It’ll still fall short.
Big features I’m envious of are: ability to select generated geometry in 3D viewport and assign to groups, ability to mix simulations on top of keyframe animation (hopefully in new animation model), and ragdoll simulations.
Maybe the expertise of the person working in Houdini on that water project was not good enough. Something similar happened to me, that I was commissioned to create “Adele” like glitter background. I quickly realized that my Houdini skills fall short to get the needed result. I was able to get satisfactory results in Blender geo nodes.
But what was later painful was rendering the animated geonodes in 3K resolution.
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This is what I like about Houdini, from observing Simon Houdini Youtube channel, that you can boolean everything and create nice props very fast with procedural approach.
Some guys are also mixing Houdini proceduralism with new PCG framework which seems like quite powerful approach.
If I am correct there is no substitute for Houdini Engine integration in UE5. This is where Blender falls short.
Could be. But if it takes that much longer to get good results from Houdini than from other softwares, Houdini will almost always lose. Investing that much time into learning software is a financial hit for anyone who isn’t financed by studio to learn software.
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On the short run - yes it takes too much time to learn Houdini or even advanced Unreal tools. And it is tempting to do things faster in Blender.
On the long run - once you have the knowledge you save time and can get even better results. This is somewhat my experience.
Yes but you still have lost that time, and now you have to charge more to make up for it. And that can’t always work, and if it does, there’s a question if clients what that much sophistication that Houdini can offer? Can they even tell a difference?