Has anyone tried to learn Houdini apprentice? Which one would you consider harder to learn Houdini or blender?
Houdini BY A LONG SHOT. It’s widely recognized within the industry as one of the most difficult packages to master. It stems from its design choice of allowing the user to mess with pretty much anything they want to. The GUI is a little bit much to take in at first as well. On the other side of the coin, you can do things in Houdini that you couldn’t dream of doing in other packages.
I installed it about six months ago, and due to severe hardware incompatibility with my AMD 7970, I could barely run it. Crash, crash, crash, crash, and more crashes. Even with the patched version opengl was crippled and extremely crash-prone.
Although I am unsure how things stand now, I would say that only Nvidia owners need apply here.
Personally I dont think it matters at all, learning 3d of any kind is a lenghty process, taking years to master. Learning to use a 3d app is only the tip of the iceberg. Houdini and Blender are awesome software for their own reasons. Pick your poison, wear your diving suit, check your oxygen and deep dive.
I need to get back to learning houdini at some point. I’ve used a fair few 3d apps in the past, and I’d say I comfortable using them, but when I installed it, and tried using it, my reaction was, EH? :spin:
It is awesome though!
I tried to learn Houdini several times in the past. It is insanely powerful if you know how to use it but I couldn’t even grasp how to orbit the viewport at first. Then when I finally figured that out I got stuck trying to add a primitive object, after that I couldn’t figure out how to enter edit mode and that’s when I stopped trying. There were no tutorials available at that time which covered the basics so I had to spend almost a week just trying to figure that out myself.
Maybe now they have made it a bit more user-friendly, I guess I should download the free version and try it out again.
My experience is the same as Herbert123. The Houdini Apprentice software crashes constantly. Blender is way more stable than Houdini. I reported this on their forum and they seemed quite surprised that the software did not work. Any crashes they seem to blame on video drivers. But I have other software using the same hardware/drivers that does not crash. It seemed to crash the same on both of my Windows systems so I think there are bugs in that program. And the thing is, I would come back to the program a couple of week later thinking oh yeah, I’ve got to learn this. But then it would crash again I would remember, Oh yeah, it does not really work.
The interface and workflow are not that different than most other packages. Mastering the nodes could take years, however. I was able to do several of the tutorials and get the same results as the author. The ability fracture on the fly is pretty cool.
I found it to be very stable in linux, using an nvidia card
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Other Software”
from time to time i tend to mess around with it a little bit. Not much serious stuff though. The nodes names are quite strange sometimes so you have to learn a lot on that side. But on the other hand houdini does something that makes it quite hard for the average artist on the one hand but extremely intuitive and powerful for the more technical person on the other hand and that is it doesn’t hide most of the underlying techniques. You can dive into almost every aspect and manipulate and combine everything.
That is really an aspect blender should learn from as it could free development resources by outsourcing building of complex functionality to the community.