http://area.autodesk.com/Anaheim2013 [area.autodesk.com]

Video: “Autodesk Anaheim User Event 2013 - Behind the curtain of RD” at 08:00

Heh, looks like Autodesk trying to make their own Houdini engine in Maya.

they will not succeed by just buying plugins

i think bitfrost was a separate software(core engine) and in maya they made a interface. there is somewhere a post on a max forum.

cool stuff! More nodebased methodologies never hurt. Considering all the cool stuff that has come out of Softimage's ICE and that is very portable in concept to houdini, I look forward to what some of the more hardcore Maya users will do with this node-based interface.

I like Duncan's corner too. for years that guy has been using Maya in unconventional ways, pushing boundaries. Very inspirational! As a houdini user and ex-maya user I like to keep an eye on what else is going in and see if I can reverse engineer some of the features they have added to rebuild them as more customizable tools in houdini.
As always with those paint effects kind of elements it is very fast to get to 85% of the way there, and very hard to get the last 15% when custom changes are required. The c++ blackbox like implementation of these things does provide amazing speed for interactive viewport behaviour.
I did not see anything I thought was impossible to build in houdini, which is nice too.

i know i look bored pointing at this but please take a close look at the naiad screenshot … 02:42 of the presentation …
although avoiding the meshing process seems to be very interesting…

Looks pretty cool, although still not convinced. The progressive refinement is the coolest bit plus the direct raytracing, but Flowline could do implict surface rendering (w/o meshing) in 2006!! :shock: