(and I don’t mean the node stuff, but what you’ll see in the view port)
Something wrong with your other mograph thread? – http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=151310
I love Blender but no. Get Houdini, $100 bucks and use both. Houdini - true ngons, gi rendering, high dynamic range lighting, and all of the physics simulation you will ever need.
Yes, Houdini it’s very powerful. Anyway from what I’ve heard it seems that to actually get all the power from Houdini (at least from the particle system) you need to know some programming stuff. Particles in Blender looked easy at me when I first started to try them in Blender. But at the same time limited, all that mograph stuff is simply not possible right now.
I don’t see what’s so good about n gons
When you cut you dont have triangles, ngons rules!
You don’t need to learning programming to use Houdini’s particles system. Ngon base modelers like wings3d, hexagon, Houdini, and silo allow the use to, add and remove edges, faces, and points without allot of issues to the existing 3d geometry.
Have you try wings3d?
Well, I may have used the wrong words. What you see in that video is something that’s not built and ready in Houdini, Adam Swaab is developing it. The user don’t have to go deep in the Houdini features to use basic particles, but in case one wants to get more or mograph tools like those in the video, I guess the basic knowledge isn’t enough.
anybody worked with the houdini version?
99 dollars for HD and GI rendering including polygon and nurbs modeling is really ah
come one there must be a draw back somewhere besides the non-commercial file format.
no there isnt. why should there be a draw back? autodesk is doing the same thing. you can get maya, 3dsmax, softimage, mudbox, etc. together for just 100€. educational edition … its the same thing except houdinis full version would be 7k bucks and autodesks package would be far more than 10k bucks.
and for not sounding off topic 
houdini is a great tool. thought about buying the apprentice version a few times as it is very affordable and would be a good thing to know houdini because it’s node based workflow offers a wide range of flexibility hence being well accepted in the industry.
but im realy looking forward to being able to try lukas toennes node based dynamics system. that should be quite flexible, too.
Many of features which you see are not difficult to add
see http://openmesh.org/index.php?id=297 and code http://openmesh.org/index.php?id=17
http://www.openflipper.org/index.php?id=240
what is needed is a bridge between the two kernels ( no need to replace current blender code as access to properties of verts etc are available in plugins )
- then all things which are developed for openmesh/openflipper ( including point clouds etc etc ) will be in blender
it is just - I found a place with lot of potential 
but have no time to implement by myself.
But it is doable - and also - all guys/students behind openmesh will be directly involved in Blender dev - looks like a good hook .
As someone already has mentioned, there is no difference between the artist version and the commercial one except that you can’t use it for commercial work!
On the other hand, cheetah3d sells also for $99.00 right now and the renderer is excellent. The best part is that I can use the renders commercially!
C3D is developing fast and has all kinds of other goodies that save a lot of time. For example, removing the HDRI background from a rendered image is just a checkbox … No need to use nodes.
Only downside I can think of is that it is a Mac application.
A Linux and XP port would rock!
You are kind of misleading on this one. Houdinis Apprentice is not an educational licence it is a non-commercial licence. On the otherhand it sounds like Autodesks licence is academic licence.
I’ve been looking at Houdini to see how well I could adapt to another 3d software package, they do offer a free version where rendering is watermarked and limited to 720x576.
But frigge you say it’s node based? I struggle with nodes for some reason… :mad:
Randy
At the risk of sounding like a cynic (or Endi) will people ever use tools like these? Exploit what is at your disposal first, when you have reached your limit with it then you can demand more
Limits reached and exceeded long time ago! The only reason I’m still looking at and using Blender it is its fast modeling work flow and the hope (now a chimera) that someday someone will bring procedural and parametric tools like those.
I know I’m starting to sound boring, sorry guys if somebody may feel annoyed from this kind of posts, I’ll try to limit this bumps 
Btw I also think that if anyone will ever try (and I don’t believe that) to develop something like that in Blender, it will not be an easy challenge neither I’m sure it could be totally accomplished.
Limits and reached and exceeded a long time ago? I’m sure these guys http://durian.blender.org/ and these guys http://tube.freefac.org/ will say different
As a user of both applications(Houdini and Blender) I can safely say that these 2 apps share no resemblance whatsoever. If you want practical solutions and speed you want Blender, if you want interesting (sometimes convoluted), sexy, procedural, sometimes amazingly practical and unique solutions you want Houdini.
Also Houdini is not like any other application out there. If you want to learn enough to use it for your own projects, you probably will need to spend 5-8 months straight hardcore learning. That learning curve is not that steep with most applications, especially nowadays. Learning Maya or Xsi would be 3 times easier than Houdini. Learning Blender is 2x faster than Maya or Xsi probably. Mileage will vary from person to person, but should give you some basic picture.
If particles is what you’re after, check out the Blender particles branch, it’s pretty much making very complex simulations by making a program with nodes.
It’s being developed at a decent pace and can even use OpenCL (so your GPU can be used)
@ Jay: I’m talking about mograph stuff, not film production. The limit about mograph stuff with Blender is reached when you try the particle system: since Blender doesn’t have other tools than that, wherever the particle system can bring you, that’s the limit. This wouldn’t be a weak point but unfortunately there are two points to consider: the particle system currently has several faults, and where it’s complete and fully working doesn’t allow to get that results. Where you can achieve some of those results, is not without certain efforts, but that’s a second point that would go under a production matter (that’s not part of the topic of this post).