I get what you mean. Bc one also has to make living. But on other hand I think that time spent learning is never lost time. It is mixture between passion for work, improving, and delivering quality results. Whether one uses Blender, Houdini or whatever.
The Nuja feather geometry node asset is impressive, too.
After a couple of months playing with Houdini, my 2c thoughts :
If Houdini is a very beautiful Lego box
the strong point of Blender: Unlike Houdini, there are a lot of node groups which are available here and there, and which already allow you to do a lot of things very quickly, while waiting for geometry nodes to be more advanced, in 3, 5 years from now.
I think you hit on an important point – everything in Houdini requires specialization to achieve the type of results that people ohh and ahh at when they see some Houdini eye-candy. In many ways Houdini is the anti-generalist tool. SideFX has been trying to somewhat ease the cost of admission by creating some pre-made node trees with some effects that can act as starting points. The problems begin when you start needing to make something that doesn’t fall into the common.
Ultimately, the tools don’t matter, the only thing that matters is what gets you to the finish line with a result that the client is happy with.
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I disagree with this! Houdini by default ships with mountains of node groups and presets, while currently geometry nodes offer mostly only the Lego blocks. In Houdini you have the blocks and also the relatively user friendly more higher level tools. This is something I miss a lot in Blender’s geometry nodes, because they mostly only offer the essential, low-level nodes, and one has to reimplement most higher level stuff by oneself.
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This is something which will change as geo nodes mature. Right now you have to build your own higher level tools or buy a library from some of a few geo node wizards.
Many nodes in Houdini are prepackaged HDA with low level nodes. Essentially groups in Blender. It’s not apples to apples but the systems are very similar.
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Yeah, this is kind of funny to see.
I felt the same but I will reserve my judgment after some time with the latest version.
I just didn’t see many things in the teaser that I personally would like to see. Saying that I know that there are a lot of stuff which was really asked by Houdini artists. So I don’t think it’s a bad release. It’s probably better than the teaser shows. Need to wait for HIVE videos. They’re usually way more informative.
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Well you need to know, usually they have new feature in the xx.0 release, and then more stability and more niche feature here and there in their xx.5 release, I guess this time it’s just a stability release with features more specialized artists. Still waiting for them to do a real gpu solver for fluid…
Here is a list all the features that where shown at the end of the sneak peek video.
Animation
• APEX (All-Purpose Execution) architecture for fast rig creation and evaluation
• APEX-driven rigging and animation toolset within KineFX: BETA
• High-performance procedural rigging framework
• Growing set of readily available auto-rigging tools
• APEX rigging network editor with unique debugging capabilities
• Efficient packed geometry format to encode entire animation scene
• Dedicated animation environment for characters rigged with APEX
• In-viewport access to all essential animation tools
• Toolbar with animator-friendly sliders e.g. key blending and resampling
• Many UX and functionality enhancements to animation graph view
• Natively integrated motion dynamics and ragdolls
• Powerful, one-click pivot setting for fast posing
• Quick and seamless switching between IK and “fake” FK
• Flexible, animator-friendly “velcro” constraint system
• Animation bookmarks on playbar and in animation graph view
• Selection Sets with easy control and access directly in viewport
• Fully customizable python interaction and rigging controls
• Hotkey and radial menus for quick access to functionality
• Dem Bones Skinning Converter SOP
• Auto-generated MikkT tangents and normals for glTF and FBX import
• Joint scaling removal option for FBX export
• Smoothing group support for FBX SOPs and ROPs
• DCC export presets for FBX Animation Output and FBX Character Output
• ML skinning with scripts, networks and training dataset In Content Library
I found these very interesting, even though I don’t even know what half of it means.
But I was wondering, is this something that might make some people over at Autodesk a little-bit sweaty?
Seems like SideFX is taking this topic quite serious.
Also APEX is quite the ominous naming decision.
My thoughts are the same. Clearly SideFX is taking animation, which is Maya’s perhaps only great strength, very seriously. If they succeed in this, perhaps they will manage to take Autodesk out of many pipelines.
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Yeah, I saw the praise for KineFX rigging and animation system too. And it seems like a lot of artists even from Maya prefer it. What they usually ask for is for a bit more refinement and better UI/UX.
If Houdini solves this it might be indeed largely the end of Autodesk in movies pipelines.
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I love kinefx use of procedural rigging, but it can definitely be heavily refined and needs better UI/UX. Animating with a rig pose node is cool, because you can stack them like they were animation layers, but animating in the viewport is very annoying and the graph editor isn’t the best.
If they succeed, I don’t see any reason to have Maya installed. I’d do my modeling, look dev(haven’t learned solaris yet), etc in blender and everything else in Houdini, including rendering. Although, currently, i’m having a better time using Cycles and Redshift than Karma.
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Ask any animator if they even want to touch Houdini.
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That’s precisely the topic discussed. Houdini is going all-in with animation improvements, in order to become welcoming to animators. Take a look at the release notes
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Things change. USD has gained a big momentum in the industry and its promise of being a universal format that allows people to collaborate and work on the same assets is enticing to everyone, animators included. No software currently works better for this than Houdini, which fundamentally natively supports USD through Solaris. If they manage to create good, friendly tools for animators, I don’t see why this can’t work out well.
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It’s fascinating reading and hearing about these animation developments.
I think I remember SideFX were asking dedicated Softimage artists / animators for feedback way back during the time that XSI was culled. I guess they needed to focus on other priorities and road maps at the time but that now all of that might be coming together.
If they manage to pack an artist friendly animation environment that seamlessly integrates physics-based stuff (ragdolls, collisions …), and tissue simulation on top of their super-flexible, well thought KineFX rigging system I’d say they have the potential to blow their competition out of the water.
n that regard all depends on whether they’ll be able to wrap their tech wizardry in a way such that the less tech-savy, more right-brain-hemisphere driven people can operate it too, without getting forced out of their artistic visions, by the intricacies of node networks and VEX.
And of course, all depends on whether any form of “manual” animation will still be a thing in the next years, or whether AI-based cloud services will swallow and devour it all …
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Why should that happen? Afaik, there hasn’t even been wide adoption of mocap outside of video game production. Or has there?
greetings, Kologe
Tell me.
Because it’s convenient, cheaper, because it can be done?
Well it is my understanding the widespread adoption of motion capture in game pipelines stems from the fact vast amounts of animation is usually required for video games and motion capture based pipelines scale better than manual animation based ones.
Any one game can require a lot of (motion) capture data, since characters often need to be able to respond in so many ways. I spoke to a Danish game dev company and they said for each character in their game they had 16000 animation shots.
-Jacob Balslev, founder and CEO of Rokoko (fxguide.com sep 24, 2018)
There seems to be some reason why,- afaik - motion capture has not seen this widespread adoption outside of game pipelines.
convenient, cheaper, can be done probably all applies to mocap all the same. Yet no dominance of mocap over manual animation, except in games and highend VFX shots (if I’m not misstaken).
Hence my question.
greetings, Kologe
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Somehow USD will help for animator to use Houdini. This is the strongest Kool-aid I have ever seen.