Thanks for the Feedback! In my first president’s blog, I asked for feedback from the CG community to help me better understand how artists working with Houdini for the first time are faring. I received a lot of great emails including Adam Bakowski’s “Christmas present” comment which was representative of the positive feedback I received over and over again. While the tone of the feedback was likely influenced by the prospect of winning a copy of Houdini Master, it should be noted that the winner was picked randomly and therefore the feedback didn’t have to be positive. Nevertheless most of the comments were positive and we received some great images which can be attributed to the ongoing efforts of our talented development team. By the way, the draw has taken place and the winner has been notified. I was pleased to see that the winner is a student just getting started in his career and we wish him well in his studies and future career. And the Winner is… Chris Rydalch
Over the last three years, Chris has been busy painting and gold-leafing various buildings around the country. This unique skill has earned him the nickname 'goldleaf' amongst his colleagues in the animation program at BYU. He spent two years in Chile as a missionary, where he became fluent in both written and spoken Spanish, and loves playing football, soccer, or anything else competitive. Chris offered some wonderful feedback which is appreciated because it recognizes the work our development team puts into making the software stronger in all areas "I feel that Houdini is a sleeping giant in regards to character animation, and that once more animators and studios take a serious look at it, Houdini could very easily become a mainstream character animation tool, and not be regarded solely as an FX artist’s magic bullet." – Chris Rydalch
Lots of Positive Feedback Here is a sampling of the great comments and artwork submitted by the community:
“Houdini lets you work the way you want to work. You are not limited to the "one and only correct sequence" You have to push to get the desired effect. In the end, Houdini is like a Christmas present that you keep unpacking every day, over and over again.” – Adam Bakowski “Houdini encourages creative thinking. Things that are hard to do, or boring and tedious when using other software, are more straight forward when done in Houdini. Now I think that contrary to popular belief, Houdini is easier compared to other applications.” - Alexandros Papadopoulos
“I'm not super technical, coming from an art background, and I can already see how I'll be able to achieve much more, a lot more easily, with Houdini. Thanks - I'm excited about doing 3d artwork again!” - Allan Henderson “Ultimately, I think Side Effects has created a 3D application that gives artists the power to escape any challenge or problem they may encounter. The more I learn about this unique program, the more confident I am that I will have the tools to tackle any project, both now and in the future with Houdini.” – Brendon Rich 
“Not only does Houdini increase my job potential, I also actually “enjoy” what I do in Houdini, the elegance of certain solutions, lifting your product to the level of multi user digital assets, endless inter-combination possibilities, trying out different solutions through switch nodes, being able to switch 3D view visualizations very fast with a lot of control and so much more. Houdini has opened up a whole new world of how things are done and I am glad I pursued my interest as I grow more and more proficient in this magical application.” – Gert de Roost “You realize you can take the whole setup you just made, change the input object, and the whole complex setup you made still works. And suddenly you're like Neo when all he could say was "Whoa... I know kung fu."” – Greg Dunn 
“It inspires a different way of thinking, a way of working which is non destructive and which makes many changes easy, changes which would require many hours of work in other packages. Instead of redoing a shot from scratch, the history of a shot is inherent in it's node layout, so very basic changes can be made to the flow and the original objects come through in the same way.” - Greg Ecker “Perhaps the best part of Houdini for me is that what would amount to coding or plug-ins in other applications become just combination of tools in Houdini. To me this is the closest I have come to having a single 3D software that meets all my creative requirement from beginning to end.” – Ikemefuna Okafor 
“Probably the thing I appreciate the most about Houdini is this - it's a perfect blending of the artistic with the logical. That combination makes me feel like there are no limits to its possibilities, and it can be stretched as far as I want to take it.” – James Kirk “My reaction is difficult to describe. Within my first 3 hours with Houdini, I was creating results that I could not believably achieve in Maya or in Max in days, even with pricey plug-ins. Houdini's UI, within a matter of hours, became my Gold Standard.” – Justin Bendo 
“My recent approach has been to re-create some earlier setups from Maya in Houdini and quite simply, I’m blown away. Things that require extensive scripting or working around silly limitations in Maya, I’ve been able to recreate in Houdini literally in minutes. The truly procedural workflow also provides a flexibility that I haven’t seen in any other package.” – Mikko Martikainen “Although it's always frustrating to switch tools in CG, i find myself up to speed with Houdini faster then I imagined it would take. Watching video-tutorials, on sidefx.com as well as 3DBuzz, Gnomon and DigitalTutors helped but i think somehow Houdini's procedural approach suits me well because I can already find solutions to challenges myself.” – Rudi Nieuwenhuis 
“I have been using various 3d packages during the last fifteen years, but Houdini is the only one that made me feel this way, there's more than meet the eyes, under the really nice and smart user interface there is raw power, some much power that it's quite frightening, but even if I have only seen the tip of the iceberg and if I would like to see some improvement here and there, I would say that Houdini is by far the most amazing of all 3D packages.” - Thomas Mifsud “I was also one of those who was rather afraid to try Houdini, since I thought It was incredibly hard to understand and to operate. However, I was very pleasantly surprised when I actually did try it out. The UI looks very clean, professional and appealing and is very easy to get into, when you used other 3D software before, so it made a very good first impression.” - Timo Rychert 
“I found that learning this software was incredibly motivating and it has brought to light a passion which I was previously unaware of. The procedural nature and underpinnings of Houdini is responsible for an exuberant leap in my knowledge of not only 3D but computer graphics in general.” - Sam Loxton “Many people say that it can be challenging to understand the inner workings of Houdini at first, but having previously worked with node based compositing systems, I found the new interface of version 9.0 very intuitive and the workflow was clear and compartmentalized. The way the network types are wired together allowing data to be exchanged and the ability to quickly and easily build digital assets to control code or channels anywhere within the scene gives the perfect balance between low level control and usability.” - Sam Loxton Thanks to everyone for entering the contest and sharing all your thoughts with us. Kim Davidson
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Congratulations to Chris Rydalch for winning a copy of Houdini Master with a one year Annual Upgrade Plan. Chris is currently finishing his first year of classes in the animation program at Brigham Young University. He is interested in visual effects, character rigging and animation, though he enjoys the exposure BYU has given him to all aspects of the pipeline.
