As some of you know I'm working at a facility that currently uses a combination of Lightwave, 3d Studio Max, and Maya.

I am meeting with the owner of the company next week Wednseday to discuss reasons for buying Houdini. I know, as an artist I should be able to come up with a few good reasons, and I have. But I need some additional artillery. It would help me if some of you could give me some reasons I may not have thought of that I can pitch in my meeting.

The questions I know I'll be asked are:

1.) How can Houdini work into our pipeline?
2.) What sets Houdini's POPs apart from 3D Max's “Particle Flow”?
3.) Why does Houdini not come with a fluid solver and decent RBD solver? When can we expect to see these additions to the software?
4.) Why is Houdini over 20,000 a license while Maya is only 7,000 a license? What makes Houdini so much more expensive?
5.) Why would we buy a software with such a limited user base?

…Keep in mind these arent my questions – there are questions I know I'll be asked. I have answers to all of them but I'd like to have more. It would be good to know what the rest of the Houdini community thinks on this…

I'm putting my neck out quite a bit in my continued push to integrate this fantastic software into our pipeline. Thoughtful responses will be greatly appreciated, afterall if I'm able to convince these guys to make the purchase we'll all have one more facility to work for that uses Houdini

In the meantime I'm using Houdini apprentice to build tools (otl's) to add some more weight to my argument. I've already made an OTL for a rain system that rivals the rain system they built in Maya… only difference is mine took a day to make and theirs took 2 months. This already helps prove my point Any additional “points” would really help.

These are tough questions that I wish the others had to answer as frequently as us.

1.) How can Houdini work into our pipeline?

Import and Export
Houdini can readily import and export all major data formats and can be easily extended with 3rd party converters that you probably already have. At the bottom of the following link is a full list of directly supported formats, in and out.
http://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/master/index.html [sidefx.com]
I noticed that it is incomplete as we now have good support for ILM's OpenEXR format which is quickly becoming a favourite image format for many high-end 3d CG facilities.

Proven Interoperability
Houdini has been co-existing with all the major 3d packages for many years in quite a few studios. In some facilities, Houdini forms a major part of the pipeline glue that supports dataflow though the facility.

2.) What sets Houdini's POPs apart from 3D Max's “Particle Flow”?

I took a quick look at Particle Flow. It is somewhat impressive. It offers many of the features that POPs has. It also seems to be well integrated in to max. It certainly needs a whole host of other plug-ins to support it in production. I strongly feel that a great particle environment needs three things:

• Great tools for creating, manipulating and processing all incoming geometry such as emitters, force objects and collision objects, point clouds, etc.
  
  Powerfull particle tools
  
  Great back-end tools to take the particle system and bind geometry, instance objects, feed in to other dynamics sims, then bind shader attributes and render out using a variety of different options from volume rendering, raw particles, sprite cards, or instance geometry.
  
  
  Houdini comes with all of the above and more. If you need to add something extra, there is always our expression environment at the ready, there is vex (enough said) and now the free HDK. With more and more people coding their own tools in HDK, I can see this option becoming very important in the near future.
  
  With max, I can count at least 4 plug-ins that you need at quite a cost per seat but we all know that no one uses cracks of 3D-Max and it's plug-ins in production to cut costs. Oh no…
  
  

  3.) Why does Houdini not come with a fluid solver and decent RBD solver? When can we expect to see these additions to the software?

  
  First off, there aren't that many decent fluid solvers out there. There's realflow which now has support for Houdini. Realflow seems to be good for what it does.
  
  Now this one is a hard swallow for all the suits out there: Much of the effects work done with houdini (many many shots in Feature Film Productions) obviously doesn't use fluid sims or RBD to do the work. POP networks can be constructed to give you the look and feel of fluid sims but are 100% directable by design. Fluid Solvers are “set up, press go, cross fingers and legs and pray. 1 Day later, oh crap they moved the props and it looks like crap.” I see this cycle repeat ad nauseum.
  
  We need RBD and Fluids in Houdini along with Cloth, skin and a whole host of other solvers. The response is Houdini 8 will ship with DOPs, Dynamic OPerators. Features will become more clear as this tool nears completion but there are a few things we can mention now:
  - complete environment for the creation of Dynamic Environments
  - Dynamic Sovers interacting with each other by sharing forces and attributes without external knowledge of any solvers.
  When will Houdini ship? I leave that up to you to figure out but it shouldn't be that hard given our past release schedules for major and minor releases.
  
  

  4.) Why is Houdini over 20,000 a license while Maya is only 7,000 a license? What makes Houdini so much more expensive?

  
  I hate this part of the discussion for one reason. It is not the initial cost of the software that is the real exense, it is the cost of the user and the time it takes to do his or her work measured in months and years. It is also not apples to apples. Our 20000 includes support and upgrades, right?
  
  Our price also reflects our position within the 3D CG industry and what the product is capable of. The Houdini architecture does require a much tighter development team (smaller) which reduces the raw development pace although it really doesn't seem to be that evident at all. We also care very much about the customer-vendor relationship, not just lip service. This has a cost as well. Our interest is to get the best tools out to our customers, not to be the next Photshop for 3D on everyone's desktop. This all costs money to support and maintain. We have a strong user community commited to us and our costs and see the value in our price.
  
  I can put this analogy out there: What kind of car does your boss drive? Why did he pay so much for that car? Why does a ferrari cost $350,000 US while a Corvette only costs $60,000? They both go fast, right? The comparison between Houdini and Maya/Max/Lightwave/etc has it's parallels.
  
  Maya Unlimited at $7000 needs more unlimited to work across the facility. You can't open an Unlimited file in Complete. Within the Houdini family, you can bundle Master with Escape licenses for considerably less money. Escape can open Master licenses and interact with the Master scene for a nice solution to scale cheaply.
  
  There are also several examples where a Houdini artist was able to build “Fisher Price” interfaces to very complex Digital Assets so that Maya artists could immediately work in Houdini. If Scalability is an issue, use this arguement.
  
  Now for the niggly bit and I really hate pricing as anyone reading this a year from now will critisize: Is that node-locked maya or floating license maya? How much are the upgrades and support? How quickly does Alais respond to Bug requests and support questions with meaningful production answers? Please check.
  
  

  5.) Why would we buy a software with such a limited user base?

  
  What the employer is really saying: “We buy this real expensive software and now you piss off and leave!” Dead-end situation for your boss.
  
  The answer is that there is a growing pool of excellent houdini users due in part by the apprentice program. Houdini is certainly accessible to all users willing to undergo a small paradigm shift. There are excellent resources for new users to get up and running with Houdini.
  
  The question you should ask back is: “ Am I worth the additional investment of Houdini Master and all relavent upgrades and support for the forseable future to you?”
  Given that this company has every software solution under the sun in-house, what is another piece of software going to hurt?
  
  
  Post-Mortem:
  
  I have seen this time and again where a company buys a license of Houdini and that user excells only to become constantly berated by users of other software, constantly fighting for money to pay for the latest releases, always getting the crap that no one else wants or can't do, has the shortest turn-around times, and always gets blamed when the shot looks bad but rarely gets credit when the shot looks good.
  
  There will always be opportunities for those good Houdini users if all else fails.
  
  
  Some additional items to sweaten the pot are:
  - Houdini's very competent Renderer, Mantra. Mantra is very scalable and relatively inexpensive. Not to mention that it is feature-film proven with many parallel features to RenderMan.
  - Master comes with a complete compositing solution integrated.
  - Excellent support and forums.
  - Major bugs addressed very quickly. Measured in hours to days, not years to decades! We also don't make our bug fixes into features. 3D-Max and Maya are guilty of this from time to time, no?
  - Frequent Builds released to address bugs and minor enhancements between minor releases.

SESI need to toot there own horn a little louder. It is hard to find references to where Houdini has been used. you you can find some spots on some websites but more often than not you never here about Houdini being used on a project until you hear it through the grape vine. the SESI website should be the first stop in finding out where Houdini has been used and how it saved the day on yet another move. But hey if you guys are just too busy making the best 3d package on the planet we cant really complain….. But it would be nice to have something to show, as in a URL, to people when they say maya is “Da Sh!t”.

Coming from 10 years working in film and now working in games, this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I am totally sold on Houdini as a solution that gives artists the tools to create anything without needing to program scripts or plugins and to solve a whole host of production problems that no other software company is dealing with.

Here are some of the points you should bring up to counter the cost argument:

1). A full Houdini Master license gives you unlimited Render Tokens for your render farm. Add up 10 licenses of high quality film renderers like Mental Ray or Renderman to populate your 10 PC render farm and see where you are financially. Get a bigger render farm and the cost savings are bigger. (Why doesn't Side Effects trumpet this a little more?!?) By the way, Mantra does real displacements, real volumetric rendering, full and flexible Global Illumination, and offers Point Cloud rendering which can give totally convincing high quality Subsurface Scattering rendering in a fraction of the time of other solutions.

2). Houdini includes a full high quality fast film compositing solution. Add licenses of Shake or other film compositing licenses to your Maya/Max pipeline and compare costs. High quality compositing is one thing that can really elevate your imagery and is something that should not be ignored. I wouldn't consider Combustion or After Effects or some other video based compositors in this league as they tend to choke on many levels of film resolution images. The Houdini compositor also supports Houdini Deep Rasters so you can render out many passes (Depth, Normals, or any custom level you create in VOPs) at one time (saving render time and simplifying directory organization) into one multiple channel image and use them in your compositor. This compositor is available as a seperate inexpensive license called Halo for folks that only do compositing.

2). Every artist doesn't need to use Houdini Master like was previously mentioned. Only the effects TDs really need it at this point. All animators, modellers, character riggers, effects animators (using setups/simulations/tools made by the Effects TDs) shader creators, texturers, lighters, and rendering folks can use the $2000 Houdini Escape. So for a small studio you may have only one or two full Houdini licenses, and a slew of other Escape and Halo licenses with no problems like you have mixing Maya Unlimited and Maya Complete licenses where Complete users can't run some things created in Unlimited.

3). With Houdini you have no need of hiring expensive programmers. With Maya and other software you need to hire tool and pipeline programmers to make the software support your needs and handle real production issues. Houdini IS a pipeline and has Digital Asset management built in and everything can easily be converted to a “tool” or OTL that the whole studio has access to. This is one of the biggest reasons to use Houdini- it's flexibility to reuse assets and modify them without having to rebuild from the start as is usually the case with other software. Many different artists can be working on the same asset easily without the linear pipeline that is more necessary in other packages. For instance an animator can start animating on a rough model/rig and the model/rig can keep changing over time until it's finalized without the animator losing any animation.

4). I have shown some of the modelling and character rigging tools here at EA to my Maya expert friends and they are very impressed. They wish Maya was as easy and fast and powerful. Houdini is not just an Effects package any more.

5). No cloth? Yeah, it sucks, but there is Syflex which is a high quality fast cloth plugin that a lot of studios using Maya also pay for and use since it tends to give better/more stable/faster results than Maya's built in cloth. So that's a toss up. Maya Escape plus Syflex is still cheaper than Maya Unlimited, by the way… Plus DOPs is on the way which promises to be better and more powerful than any other solution on the market. It's not a thrown together inflexible add-on like Maya tends to release, but a fully integrated fully thought out enhancement.

6). No Fluid dynamics? Yeah, that sucks too but in reality, fluid dynamics is slow and expensive to compute for a lot of real production type shots. It also isn't controllable or directable. As a long-time effects animator, I can tell you controllable and directable becomes way more important in production than “realistic simulation” when it comes to getting a shot approved in an efficient fashion. Also, look at a lot of the effects done in film for big effects films that you would think were done with fluid dynamics- many of them are done with Houdini. And if they were done with Maya, it is generally with a ton of custom coding and plug-ins. That is at a cost that many people seem to ignore. They just see “Done in Maya” and think they can buy the software and do that. With Houdini, you can.

At Disney Animation where I worked for almost ten years, our Tech Manager actually considered Houdini's cost to be the same as Maya. With Maya we had added costs of MTOR, Renderman, Shake, and programmer support for tools/plug-ins/pipeline for a full production solution, but Houdini did it all by itself. So the cost was considered equal.


Tell your boss that studios like CORE and DNA have embraced Houdini as their package of choice for their animated features. Practically every Houdini person I know has used Maya and prefers Houdini- I don't know anyone (that has really taken the time to learn the software) who has used Houdini and prefers Maya. There are reasons for this. I am not saying that Maya or Max or Lightwave don't have their advantages for certain things, but Houdini is a more complete solution for real production.

If your studio wants control, efficiency, and flexibility, Houdini really is the best solution. But that is just my opinion…

-Craig Hoffman

PS: A lot of these arguments are based on film issues and you may think they don't affect you if you just work in Video, but soon enough a lot of Video work will be in HD resolutions and the efficiencies and workflow of film work will apply.

I really appreciate the in-depth responses to my questions. I agree with a lot of the points made. My task now is to take all of these words and demonstrate them through some killer OTLs next Wednseday when I have my meeting with the powers that be to discuss purchasing Houdini.

I have 3 major selling points:

1.) Flexibility - speed at which custom tools can be built, quality of effects that can be built, organic nature of procedural setups and how one effect can be modified to achieve different results without re-building the whole system

2.) Cost & Artist pool - with the new asset manager, we only need 1-2 Master artists and could easily familiarize a Maya artist to use tools we've built in Master for implementation of assets in shots

3.) Future technology - the promise of an integrated RBD/SBD and Fluid solver in the next few releases.

I need to expand on 3.)

Does anybody out there know any more specifics relating to DOPs? Are there any URL's you could give me to actual tests done using the new solvers? Does anybody have hands on experience with these new tools? The prospect of having these dynamic operators available in Houdini and integrated into the existing pipeline seems like a dream come true. I think this could be a major selling point over Maya's fluids – I wish I had more details…

ah, I'm sort of in the same boat (though I can just get it
regardless); have some 7~8 year long max users to prise from
their software.


1.) How can Houdini work into our pipeline?
huh? pipelines are for sewage…
you mean how does it exchange data with other software?
If its just 1 licence I'd use it for standalone shots, models and
basic compositing.

2.) What sets Houdini's POPs apart from 3D Max's “Particle Flow”?
its substantially faster and doesn't crash (to my knowledge).
pflow has quite a few comfort features but will grind to a halt
with instanced geometry (which it caches per frame, all of it) and
will crash frequently with complex setups. pflow also has trouble with:
fragmenting (pArray was better for this, except for its rotation problem),
particle trails (splines), procedural textures on instanced geometry and
a very limited set of spacewarps (forces) that will work properly with it.
pops may require a bit more work to emulate some of pflows features
but this is more than compensated by the performance, stability and
additional functionality.

3.) Why does Houdini not come with a fluid solver and decent RBD solver? When can we expect to see these additions to the software?
dops in version 8 are said to be outstanding, but I haven't tried it yet.

4.) Why is Houdini over 20,000 a license while Maya is only 7,000 a license? What makes Houdini so much more expensive?
in its intended role (vfx) it would probably pay itself off in a week or two.

5.) Why would we buy a software with such a limited user base?
its relatively easy to learn given its logical node-based ui.
its easier to train up a bright but inexperienced person to use software anyway.
there's hardly any scripting required (scripting dependence in maya can turn a 1-week job into a 1-month job,
I've seen it way too often, maxscripting is better but there is still usually a 1~2 day delay).
the current user base, though small, is generally very experienced and helpful.
you're already working on the size of the user base

there are a few other things that they may also mention:

mantra is way slow compared to the scanline renderer and vray.
texturing is more time consuming than in max.
lighting is more time consuming than in max.
vex (vops) is quite limited.
there is no ‘local co-ordinate space’ in sops.
the compositor has no tracking.

also they may ask how the character animation tools are better than C.A.T. for max.

I've found the best way to convince people of its value is by
example; replicating/exceeding what people have done in other
software, but faster and more efficiently.

good luck!

-cpb

craiglhoffman
1). A full Houdini Master license gives you unlimited Render Tokens for your render farm.

That's interesting we only get 10 per Houdini master license, do you have to apply for more specially?

Si

> mantra is way slow compared to the scanline renderer and vray.

Really? Are we running comparable shaders and quality here?

> texturing is more time consuming than in max.

Does this take into account UVPelt, UVBrush, display of uv backfaces, and the fact that you can use AttribTransfer to avoid redoing uv work when the model has changed?

> lighting is more time consuming than in max.

What type of lighting tools does max have?

> vex (vops) is quite limited.

VEX is SIMD language. It's not a general purpose scripting language. The proper comparison here is MEL/Maxscript with hscript/expression languages.

> there is no ‘local co-ordinate space’ in sops.

I don't understand this. All of the point positions in SOPs are in local space (to the object).

these are not so much my own comments (I'm still thinking its a
user thing) but what I get from others who have either tested
the program or seen me test it, and for which I don't really
have a good counter-argument.

>> mantra is way slow compared to the scanline renderer and vray.
>Really? Are we running comparable shaders and quality here?

yep, tested with very basic things like 1 object, vex clay and a single
light with 4x4 samples and a 512x512 map. mantra was about 3 times slower than scanline, except with reflections/refractions, where they
were about equal.
i'm sure the times can be levelled with tweakage, but that setup time has
to come from somewhere.
when I have time I can set up/post more complex scenes.

>> texturing is more time consuming than in max.
>Does this take into account UVPelt, UVBrush, display of uv backfaces, and the fact that you can use AttribTransfer to avoid redoing uv work when the model has changed?
this is more a ui thing; simple drag'n'drop vs vops then shops
(and a deeper understanding of how shaders work).
uv pelt is a fantastic tool; another selling point.

>> lighting is more time consuming than in max.
>What type of lighting tools does max have?
light types and params are all in one place,
shadow types are: map, area, raytrace.
there's no quick in-built point instancing but
there are quite a few utilities that do it
(wrote one myself ages ago, pretty straightforward).
generally doesn't glitch on default settings.
doesn't create file dependencies with shadow maps.
so mostly its another ui/convenience thing.

>> there is no ‘local co-ordinate space’ in sops.
>I don't understand this. All of the point positions in SOPs are in local space (to the object).
for handle alignment when editing, to avoid manual
handle orientation picking.
I had posted an explanation somewhere in the beta forum ages ago.
I think someone else even posted a screenshot from max…


-cpb

About the mantra comment:

Are you trying with an area-light? Or a point light? Just wondering about the 4x4 comment.

But basically, doing a test of a scene with a single primitive is not a speed test. If your scenes are that simple, use OpenGL and get 120fps render times. What you *should* test is an object of 300k polys moving (motionblurring) and accessing multiple 4k (.rat format) textures. With raytracing. The real speed of mantra is also evident when you do something like have highly displaced surfaces and such, especially when the camera in side the displacement bounds.

In my own tests with a vehicle of 500k polys motionblurring and raytracing itself and a moderately detailed environment of about 30k polys, mantra knocks the socks off prman RAM-wise and often speed-wise. Seriously. The only thing to watch out for is setting your Raytraced LOD correctly if you're raytracing against displaced surfaces (raytraced shadows (fastShadows) included).

Now try doing full subsurface scattering too and use pointclouds to do it. Tell me thats not fast. I can render a near-photoreal subsurface head, subdivision surface with displacement mapping accessing 5 4k textures , full screen at 800x600 in about 4-5 minutes.

I'll admit that using area-lights and raytracing the hell out of scene using carefree application of the Global Illumination SHOP while possibly using displacement mapping can quickly get you into the hours even on relatively simple scenes, but if you're frugal and tactical about your renders I guarantee that you'll find mantra hard to beat for time .vs. quality .vs. ramusage .vs. flexibility.

Not sure if it's too late to chime in, but I figured I might give my 7 cents. I supposed it's more of my own personal opinion, tho.

One of the reason why I really really liked Houdini is because I am not a programmer or a CS guy. As an artist, I am always afraid of being limited by the software package without doing hardcore programming or resort to commercial plugins. Houdini presents to me a suite of tools and expression functions that allows me to do much without resorting to much programming. I after diving into the VEx SOP world for about 3 weeks, VEx like a Super Point SOP to me. The other huge thing for me is Houdini's flexibility. At the current studio that I am working at, certain things are yet to be solidified, hence the setups that we build in Houdini needs to be able to adapt to such changes according to other department's needs and we also need be able to push massive amount of data down the pipe.


Well, there's much more I can say, but, I think it's already being said over and over before.

All the best,
Alex

jason_iversen
About the mantra comment:

Are you trying with an area-light? Or a point light? Just wondering about the 4x4 comment.

But basically, doing a test of a scene with a single primitive is not a speed test.

the test was using a point light, a 61k poly object and the 4x4 was
for shadow map samples (in both max and mantra).
If I were to add motion blur the results would look even worse for
mantra. scanline is simply very fast for most day-to-day scenery.
where it falls over is: raytracing, displacement, supersampling of
high-contrast detail, irradiance and trajectory-following
motion blur (sometimes). these are things we don't need 80% of the
time, and when we do there's vray which is almost as fast, except
for its motion blur
as mentioned, more complex tests later…

-cpb

I just wanted to jump in here and let you know that we have a lot of experience helping make these types of arguments. We are happy to work with you directly to see how Houdini may fit your various project needs.

Please feel free to contact me directly at Side Effects to assist you in this process.

Thanks!

- Sarah

the_squid
As some of you know I'm working at a facility that currently uses a combination of Lightwave, 3d Studio Max, and Maya.

I am meeting with the owner of the company next week Wednseday to discuss reasons for buying Houdini. I know, as an artist I should be able to come up with a few good reasons, and I have. But I need some additional artillery. It would help me if some of you could give me some reasons I may not have thought of that I can pitch in my meeting.

The questions I know I'll be asked are:

1.) How can Houdini work into our pipeline?
2.) What sets Houdini's POPs apart from 3D Max's “Particle Flow”?
3.) Why does Houdini not come with a fluid solver and decent RBD solver? When can we expect to see these additions to the software?
4.) Why is Houdini over 20,000 a license while Maya is only 7,000 a license? What makes Houdini so much more expensive?
5.) Why would we buy a software with such a limited user base?

…Keep in mind these arent my questions – there are questions I know I'll be asked. I have answers to all of them but I'd like to have more. It would be good to know what the rest of the Houdini community thinks on this…

I'm putting my neck out quite a bit in my continued push to integrate this fantastic software into our pipeline. Thoughtful responses will be greatly appreciated, afterall if I'm able to convince these guys to make the purchase we'll all have one more facility to work for that uses Houdini

In the meantime I'm using Houdini apprentice to build tools (otl's) to add some more weight to my argument. I've already made an OTL for a rain system that rivals the rain system they built in Maya… only difference is mine took a day to make and theirs took 2 months. This already helps prove my point Any additional “points” would really help.

Well, I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about max's scanline renderer - it might be great, I have no idea. These things can be difficult to make 1-1 comparisons with.

I do have some experience with mantra however, and I can definately testify to its stability, speed and versatility in production. And its future is very bright, IMHO. You won't be disappointed when it comes time to push it.

Hey Squid,

You guys were talking about importing files. Check this out.

http://martian-labs.com/glue_index.html [martian-labs.com]

Here is your fluids.

http://martian-labs.com/product_index.html [martian-labs.com]

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Just one thing on Mantra's performance: Not having used the scanline renderer of max for quite some time (last time I opened it, it was max 2.5), I cannot really compare it here to mantra, however Maya's internal renderer is usually pretty fast as well when it comes to renders, as long as no raytracing involved. When I first compared it to Mantra I thought ‘Dear me … Mantra is slow’.
However I did renderer a small animation and the bottom line is, there was no flickering of highlights / shadowmaps etc. in the mantra rendered animation. Increasing the render quality settings in Maya to match Mantra's rendering quality Maya's renderer turned out to be slower. Being able to render multiple renderer passes in one go makes Mantra fast and the ability to output the renderings at floating point prescion would have made our compositor even happier.

Jens

I'm currently rendering millions of particles in Mantra in a few minutes per frame.

One other important point All software has bugs. The fastest turnaround you'll get on bug fixes is if all your software is written in-house, but for most people that's not an option.

2nd fastest turnaround on bugs is from Side Effects. I ran into a bug in Mantra, and it was fixed in a matter of hours, the next morning's build (which is automatically posted for download!) was available and there you go. I do not know of any other major 3D vendor that can do that without special ($$$$) arrangements. This is standard operating procedure for SESI.

Almost all SESI customers have stories like this…

Your support dollars WILL save you time and money!

Cheers,

Peter B

So what is the story with how many Mantra tokens you get for free with a full Houdini license? I guess I am wrong stating that it was unlimited, but I swear I remember reading this at some point. How many do you get?

And Martian Lab's Hydrous Tools are not “fluids”. We were talking about CFD (real fluid dynamics). Also, the Martian Glue stuff is cool, but involves baking everything out to RIB and bringing it into Houdini on a frame by frame basis. This doesn't really handle skeletons, etc. nor does it allow export of Houdini stuff to other packages- just to RIB which many other packages don't import, (although perhaps something like PolyTrans can do it…)

-Craig

On the mantra webpage it sais that every Houdini Master ships with unlimited Mantra render licences.

http://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/mantra/index.html [sidefx.com]

I hope SESI didn't simply forget to update that webpage.

Jens

Hey Craiglhoffman,

Interesting I did not know the Hydros Toolz was not CFD. Thats kind of disappointing in light of that fact. Its also interesting that it imports in the RIB on a frame by frame basis. Thats not so great. The rest I knew but still very interesting thanks for the info.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler