Fluid, pyro, smoke, animation, rendering, modeling, RBD, particles, cloth, …etc

What's your favorite and which one do you think houdini is the best software for it?

Definitely HOM

I would have to go with volumes (fluids, sdf, microsolvers, dops, pyro) and vops (speed, control, customizability, pointcloud and volume lookups, – kinda leads into shader building and rendering too).

HOM is pretty sweet too, but I don't tend to make use of it on a daily basis - it's more the glue that holds my tools together.

Also you might want to read this:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=7241540&postcount=17 [forums.cgsociety.org]

Without a doubt digital assets. Many have tried recently but do not even come close. Oh wn gotta love expressions too

grayOlorin
Without a doubt digital assets. Many have tried recently but do not even come close. Oh wn gotta love expressions too

in absolute agreement !

those have become indispensable and Great features at the same time ( !! )

isnt that adorable ?

The whole architecture .

Rob

pclaes
Also you might want to read this:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=7241540&postcount=17 [forums.cgsociety.org]

That post almost made me cry
I have to agree with everything you said there.

My favorite features are:
vex/vops as a unified language to control data in every context
mantra because it's so flexible and very fast if you know what you're doing
digital assets for making the workflow of developing and deploying tools so much easier (though they are not perfect yet) –> http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/14266-approach-to-lighting-and-managing-big-scenes/page__p__88431&#entry88431 [forums.odforce.net]

-dennis

dulo
Definitely HOM

and ASSETS and PYTHON NODES ..

I go with DOPs! and also this piece of software is as magical as Houdini himself!

eitht.

It has to be the users imho.

Support! No other software even touches Houdini's support…

For me it has to be the architecture. There will be some packages that can do some things faster, or smoother, or even better. But its features are at the mercy of the developers and usually you don't have to dig too deep before you want something that doesnt either isn't possible or would take an enormous effort to achieve.

Houdini enables both artistic and technical user to develop their own tools/feature/solutions to jobs that are most of the time totally unique.

Procedural approach and using all advantages of Node-Based architecture, Assets/VEX/VOP for creating new “nodes” without programming, some unreal optimization, many “smart” nodes, more puzzle-like workflow etc.

Architecture, VEX, Python, expressions, operator concepts, contexts, control, digital assets, mantra, lazy focus, etc.