Blender user tries Houdini for the FIRST time!

Houdini is the holy grail of CG software and I finally tried it out.

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[BadNormals]

Anyone got plans to test it out as well?

[Mitch_Crane]

It's called Houdini because a good magician never reveals how his software works

[CallMeChato]

Nice. I hung out in the same building as the guys who developed Houdini in Toronto. Would see what they were up to occasionally. At the time it was 100% command line. It was so much fun to see hundreds of walking people as individual particles. After the rendering, of course.

[z-beeblebrox]

Houdini is what happens when a bunch of super-insider industry folks, spending every waking hour together, decide the string of inside jokes they've replaced their entire spoken language with is an acceptable way to identify the features in their software.

[TheHenryMedhurst]

I actually worked on one of the shots in your intro so cheers!

Yeah Houdini is super hard when you’re going in blind. If your goal is to really go for it and learn it, definitely look up some people who have created amazing tutorials on how everything works (my recommendations are usually Rebelway and Applied Houdini for the FX stuff).

Your crops joke got me too 🤣 Those networks are operator networks, so they basically contain different types of nodes for different parts of the process. So by default you’re in an object network, but as a cheat sheet here’s what they all mean!

ROP - Render Operators - Basically anything to do with caching out some data from your setup. Rendering images, caching files, that kind of thing.

SHOP - Shading Operators - If you’re working with most renderers you’ll be here. Houdini does have a MAT context for it’s Mantra shaders (Houdini’s default renderer) but both do largely the same things just for different renderers.

COP2 - Compositing Operators - Nuke is a WAY better option for doing comp work, however you can use Houdini’s COPs to do some procedural texture work and throw a slap comp together for a supervisor!

TOP - Task Operators - this was a context really built for people who wanted to run the same setup with slightly varied results. So let’s say you modelled a house and needed 50 variations for a video game. That kind of thing. There are ways of doing it in your standard object network, but it’s a different toolset for a different industry.

CHOP - Channel Operators - Basically a way of driving a parameter with some other data. It could be noise, time, a game controller input or a combination of all sorts.

LOPs (or Stage) - Lighting Operators - the industry is rapidly moving towards using USD (Universal Scene Description) for lighting and finishing shots. This is where that will be available in Houdini (and is in 19.0 and above, I believe)

Look forward to the next video you do with Houdini! Keep pushing - it’s all doable!

[lewistaylorFX]

This was enjoyable!
I hope you continue on your journey. The acronyms do seem confusing at first, but here is the truth.
A Houdini session/hip file is actually just a collection of folders and files on disk, it's actually an archive like a zip file.
So OBJ, MAT, OUT, etc contexts are actually folders, and when you are in those folders the types of nodes/operations you can do are limited to
the function of that folder. That's why certain nodes won't be available depending on the context you are in.

The true power of houdini isn't that it's procedural/non-destructive, or that no solver or tool is blackboxed hidden away from you.
It's real power comes from the fact that all geometry is just points, primitives, and volumes. And that houdini doesn't care what tool you use
to manipulate the geometry. If there's a cool terrain deformer you can use that on your particles, if there's a tool that operates on particles you can
use that on your normal geometry. So there's never a corner you are painted into, and if you are curious or want to change how a solver actually works
you can dive in and see/change it. Nothing is abstracted away from you.

But the learning wall is called the wall for a reason, it is the hardest piece of software to use, but that can be reduced if you focus on learning the contexts, the
SOP = surface operators context (where most modeling and deforming geometry happens), and learning how attributes flow through the program.

[gauffreaunutella]

The magic with houdini is that you can do so many things by different ways
It seems very difficult at first but when you got the logic of the soft it’s very pleasant

[Bullitain]

Great video, really enjoyed seeing a fresh perspective on how cryptic houdini is to new beginners. I’d still call myself a beginner even after 1.5 years learning it. Stick in there !

[ysomadbeats]

My teacher at TAFE where i learnt 3d modeling basically told me that houdini has the steepest learning curve, but once you get to the top of it, there's nothing in 3d you can't do. You see most people approach learning houdini the wrong way, traditionally people manipulate faces, edges and vertices when making a 3d model, however in houdini, your manipulating, filtering and apply processes to data. The best way to get started in houdini is learn some basic programming principles like logic, mathematics, how to write pseudo code. Hell you don't ever have to write a line of code, just understand the basics, from there you can use that logic to basically build your models in ways that offer so much versatility and variance its mind blowing.

Houdini also has decades of common nodes/tools already built by the community and included in houdini, this is what makes it so powerful, because most of the hard work has been done for you in most cases. It will take other software like blender YEARS to catch up to the houdini community in terms of proceduralism. And that's not to nock blender at all, blender is still one of my favorite software for general modelling.

TLDR, get past the learning curve, and not only will you be ridiculously efficiat when it comes to modeling, but you will also be in a great position for a high paying career as a technical 3d artist.

[guySchuleman]

I use Houdini every day now. When I first started out my head hurt for a week. But it is worth it. No other software comes close to the power you have in Houdini.

[aaronjohnson]

Great video. I laughed so hard at your text messages. Very good Very cool. Music and slow downs 100% awesome. lol Cant wait to check out the rest of your channel.

[niko_x_zero]

Your title reeled me in. Your sense of humor wins my subscription. Good work young sir!

[Gadalac]

It's really nice to see someone so skilled struggling when they first learn something too. Great vid!

[nickthechen]

Been really enjoying your videos, keep it up!

[VladimirRez]

I love your positive approach! thank you for the video )

[DodaGarcia]

I fell in love with Blender at very first use back in 2.8 and it remains my favorite, ever-improving 3D suite. But (maybe for being programmatically-oriented) I felt the exact same love when I first opened Houdini. I’m still a bit confused by its rendering features but the procedural and simulation aspects blew my mind.

[dvkerns]

I love your channel... nicely edited + fun / positive vibes, ...please keep it up!

[_pnpticn_]

You're going to be a big name in the blender community in no time. Your content is so engaging and your video quality is top notch.

[PetRatPro]

heck yeah! I've been wanting to try houdini, I'm excited to see how much transfers from Blender

[SamMorseBrown]

Man, your production quality is improving massively!
Awesome stuff. 👍