I'm working my way through the 3DBuzz training classes, and just got my head around the implications of procedural design in the creation of digital assets.

This is great for assets that end up rendered, but I'd love to be able to “manufacture” and prototype furniture (or anything else) within Houdini, and then create a set of drawings to send to a carpenter or machine shop.

Is there any sort of CAD export option that would allow this sort of functionality?

Or would it just be easier to prototype within Houdini, get the results I want, and then just start from that and draw it in a CAD package?



Sidenote: It would be great if there's some existing export option to do this, either within Houdini, or even 3rd party. However, I am a software developer by profession so if any existing Houdini export option provides a way to export nodes into 2D wireframes from different camera angles, I can probably work with that. I just don't know if Houdini even provides an export option that I could use.

If it'd really just be easier just to get a CAD expert to draw from scratch from a rendered prototype, I'd also like to know that.


Thanks,
Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,

Although Houdini is a powerful piece of software you don't have many options of CAD exporters to choose from. In fact there are only two of them - dxf or iges - the later one support wider types of geometries imho. I've been using Houdini and Rhino in tandem for a long time. Rhino nowadays is a standard package in a design field and deals quite well with iges stuff. Furthermore it allows to export your model into various 2D formats. So I would use it for exporting. Unfortunately this was the fastest and most flexible approach.
On the other hand, if you are brave enough you can mock up a custom exporter yourself. Python & Houdini's procedural workflow makes the process not that difficult.
What I'd love to see in houdini is a native support for 3dm format (open nurbs - if I haven't mixed things).

I was also wondering at which stage are you planning to use Houdini in the design process. Do you want to draft in houdini or model based on imported 2D drawings? I find houdini's drafting tools a bit behind the other professional CAD software.

kuba