Hi Folks

This maybe a little lazy of me to ask these questions when I could look at the Houdini spec sheet. Really I'm wanting to know what your experiences of these work flows are.

Five questions:

• What is the work flow like using Houdini with Zbrush and the texture and displacement maps that Zbursh uses including the UVs from Zbrush? Is it possible to use them hand in hand as you can with Maya and XSi etc. etc?

• If you animate characters using Endorphin or MotionBuilder etc can Houdini accept FBX files and if so how well dose it work?

• If you wanted to create a crowd scene like you can with Massive, can the power of Houdini be used to gain the same results by building your own operators?

• How photorealistic is Mantra render in practice over say Renderman or Mentalray?

• I guess there is no openEXR or HDR?

Slave1

Five questions:
• What is the work flow like using Houdini with Zbrush and the texture and displacement maps that Zbursh uses including the UVs from Zbrush? Is it possible to use them hand in hand as you can with Maya and XSi etc. etc?

Yes, check out the forums on http://www.odforce.net/forum/ [odforce.net] and search for zbrush. There is a good bit of details there.

• If you animate characters using Endorphin or MotionBuilder etc can Houdini accept FBX files and if so how well dose it work?

Houdini currently doesn't have any FBX support. But depending on the output from Endorphin or MotionBuilder it shouldn't be too hard to write a converter script.

• If you wanted to create a crowd scene like you can with Massive, can the power of Houdini be used to gain the same results by building your own operators?

Yes.

• How photorealistic is Mantra render in practice over say Renderman or Mentalray?

How photorealistic a renderer is depends on your shaders, texture maps etc. If you mean, does it support global illumination, photon maps, etc then yes it does. Its as flexible and as fast as PRMan in most cases.

• I guess there is no openEXR or HDR?

Houdini supports OpenEXR, (and HDR).