David Wigforss Anyways, long story short, after watching just a little bit of the tutorials, I wasn't too keen to see expressions. I thought Houdini was connecting nodes together! Expressions are definately more efficient (and probably better once you know what you're doing), but harder to understand what's going on, and how changing parts of the equation result in different outputs. That's one of the things I liked best about ICE. It allowed me to learn things I never was able to grasp in the past (4x4 matrix). It feels like going back to Scripted Operators, which I generally tried to avoid.
Expressions are just a way to add some control to parameters and you could go pretty far without them, but they´re helpful. The more Houdini you learn the more you will use them without almost realizing it.
David Wigforss In one of the other threads someone posted a scene with VEX. That looks like what I'm after! Another thing that I really liked about ICE was the color coding of different data types and knowing what plugs into what. Looks a bit more complicated in VEX.
You seem a bit confused with a few concepts. What you call VEX is actually VOPs (which means VEX Operators, this is, a graphical interface for the VEX shading language). And of course, we have color coding for the different data types just like ICE (after all, ICE was based on VOPs). Dark green for scalars, bright green for vectors, blue for integers, orange for strings, etc…. I think you owe to yourself a closer look at the system.
Just chiming in straight from Softimage. I didn't see any reason to keep my subscription with AD. I've been on bootcamp couple of years back and has maintained some level of operability with a Houdini Apprentice version. I just received my FX license and I'm already doing my first job and installing my Arnold License today.
So you'll be hearing more from me!
I'm also a Cinema4d user so latest news about HE is just amazing.
I've been lurking for a while but I guess now is the time to say hello.
I jumped into Houdini about 6 months ago. I went crazy with Pyro, fluids and RBD. I was very impressed and loved Houdini instantly. Then Autodesk did the dirty and I realised I didn't know how to animate a simple spinning cube or anything else I take for granted with Soft.
So I'm back at the beginning, learning it from scratch. Well done SideFX for making us feel so welcome.
I just want to say hello! My name is Oliver Weingarten and I am a long time SI user for over 16 years now. I am quite active in the ll around SI running the si-community and organizing the SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage event you might have heard of. As my focus got more and more into VFX over the last couple of years, mostly due to the fact that something like ICE exists, which enabled me to stuff I never thought to achieve in a 3D package. As evil AD now killed my beloved software platform, it is time to get my hands dirt with stuff that feels like to step forward instead of heading backward. Houdini to me feels like the only place to go since the days of ICE will be counted in the next couple of years. I will still use it, but wrapping my head around Houdini is something I will tackle in the next couple of month/years. Watching tut and digging through Jordi´s guide showed me the wast number of possibilities of Houdini. To get it sorted out and understanding when and why is the big challenge, though. A big, big thanks to Jordi for making these great guides! Great work, man! It helps a lot to see similarities and differences between SI and Houdini. Looking forward to discuss things and how Houdini might get a little less complicated and better streamlined in the future..would be great to see this package getting even better and better. And I also want to mention my great respect for the people developing this awesome piece of software. Congrats, guys!!