Hi, I'm now starting out with Houdini and would really appreciate some guidance on how to complement it, since I still love traditional modeling. My background is using Autodesks Fusion 360 for years which has been super valuable for me during my years in school. Then I started using Blender for a while now and fell in love with more or less everything including the procedural capabilities. And that everything is in one program is something I appreciate. I however am determined to go all-in on procedural and really use whatever is the best procedural tools for years to come. So am going to use Houdini.

My first question is if you would recommend me to use Maya together with Houdini, or Blender and Houdini separately? I really like to have an all-in-one program, but forward compatibility is also very important for me since I don't want to have to learn new programs after a while. And just overall is using the Houdini plugin for Maya as good as using Houdini stand alone?

My second question is if I should maybe be even more sort of ambitious and future thinking right from the start. I think game development is on a trend to impact more or less all other 3D industries. And to me, it seems like real-time 3D and interactive work even for non-games is the future of 3D. I looked at the career pages for "Rockstar Games" which arguably are the most technically innovative company in the gaming industry. And they seem to be using 3DS Max and Houdini together with their own engine. So maybe I should then be using 3DS Max and Houdini together with Unreal Engine. Not that I plan of making a game, but to be able to create the most advanced 3D imagery/videos and be real-time proof for the future with the software I choose to spend my hard-earned time learning?

Would really appreciate some thought on this.

Hi. everyone and their dog is going to have a different way of working depending on what they are trying to do. For us this is our current pipeline..

-Do most direct modelling and UV-ing in Blender.
-If finer control is needed for UVs and retopo take the model inside Maya to finish off.
-Rig and animate inside Maya
-Surface/Lookdev/Render inside Houdini
-FX/Sim etc in Houdini.
-UE4 for all realtime work (also we have had a quick look at Nvidia Ominverse)

-I think within 3-4 years we will be rigging and animating inside Houdini. Hopefully by that time Blenders UV-ing and retopo will have improved as well.

Best

Mark

Blender.

I have been learning blender over the last month, and I am really impressed. It has changed so much and ticks allot of my boxes.
Modeling/Sculpting : This is really good. Watch a couple of youtube videos and you will see what I mean. This is what I was waiting for. The new geometry nodes are moving in the right direction. Feels a bit like Softimage ICE inside of blender. I love it!

UV unwrapping : Simple and not the best out there. I still use 3dCoat/Houdini for this, but for simple stuff, it works. Some cool tricks when you dig deeper into unwrapping.

Rigging/animation : Rigging is good. Everything you need is there. Easy to edit bones, even after the rig is done. Weight painting could be better, but not bad. We have been animating in Houdini since version 15 and it still sucks balls. Our animators moved back to Maya, but are also investigating blender. So far I hear good things from them. You can only crawl through mud for so long.

Shading/texturing : Really good. Just check out the Nodevember stuff every year. Easy to use and very familiar.

Lighting/rendering : Both Eevee and Cycles are amazing. Cycles feels like a hybrid between Arnold and Renderman to me (just my opinion). Beautiful and fast enough. Eevee is a blast.

Overall: Interface is nice. Easy to customize( not that it needs it). Fast workflow and easy to learn. Tons of hotkeys that speeds up workflow allot. You also can't beat the price.

I will me moving some smaller jobs over to blender to see how we cope. So far, so good.

speaking of animation, is there a way to select all or some channels like in Maya so I can input a value for all (say, I want to put 2.5,2.5,2.5 for scale)?
I searched and didn't find a way to do this in Houdini. using the ladder MMB feature is slow...

I say go for Blender.

I am not a rigger/character animator so can't say anything for them but modeling in Blender bringing it to Houdini. Doing your FX work in Houdini and going back to Blender for renders have been my work order for the past 2 years which is amazing in my opinion. You might have some difficulties with exporting and importing stuff but other than that I can highly recommend Houdini-Blender combo.

citizen
speaking of animation, is there a way to select all or some channels like in Maya so I can input a value for all (say, I want to put 2.5,2.5,2.5 for scale)?
I searched and didn't find a way to do this in Houdini. using the ladder MMB feature is slow...

This is a good question, my best idea is to copy X and paste relative references to Y and Z so that you won't have to write 2.5 three times, which I know is not a good answer for you. Looking forward to a better answer from someone.

With the recent addition of Geometry Nodes, Blender is becoming more Houdini-like every day. Another +1 for Blender being the best complement for Houdini that I can think of.

I recently completely ditched Blender for Houdini, for model creation I went with 3D Coat, 3D Coat 2021, which is still in Beta as of this writing, has great poly-modeling, sculpting, retopology, UVing(it's awesome at uving), and painting/texturing tools, better than anything Blender has to offer, especially for retopology, uving and texturing, 3D Coat painting and texturing is more like Substance Painter, 3D painting/texturing is really basic in Blender!

When I really got into Houdini I realized how limited I was with Blender, I know it sounds corny, but with Houdini my only limitation is my imagination, 3D Coat and Houdini make a great pair and fulfil all my 3D needs at the moment!

I also have to mention that Houdini also has more than decent poly modeling tools, those are not as well known since Houdini is mostly known for FX!

Midphase
With the recent addition of Geometry Nodes, Blender is becoming more Houdini-like every day. Another +1 for Blender being the best complement for Houdini that I can think of.

No offense, but the geometry node only touches the surface of what Houdini has been doing for the last 25 years, I doubt very much that Blender will ever catch up to Houdini in this aspect, and many others, and how does a software complement when it aims at becoming the software it supposed to complement?

If I had to pick one I'd say unreal. Good to have a mix of houdini+realtime skills. And houdini engine is a nice bridge into unreal as well.

Jonathan de Blok
If I had to pick one I'd say unreal. Good to have a mix of houdini+realtime skills. And houdini engine is a nice bridge into unreal as well.

Unreal is great, I played a bit with the new Metahumans, it's so cool, and a bit scary at the same time!

Unreal Engine is a great combo with H.