antc

OneBigTree
When I say cleaning up I do not even talk about cleaning up geometry. I talk about structuring the scene in a way that you can start working efficiently with the geo in the first place - quickly. I do not see any tools for that at all in Houdini.

I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but the devils in the details a bit … it'd be great if you could expand on what kinds of tasks you mean by “start working efficiently” since many of the previous posts sounded like asset prep/cleanup type workflows.

What I mean is for example grouping similar objects, restructuring hierarchies, turning copies into instances to reduce memory footprint, renaming objects from “part_297584_cd_VX-07” to “screw_iron” 1-250 with automatic numbering and so on. So you can quickly find and isolate any piece of geometry you want to work on.
Part of this is being able to see the most important properties of an object at a glance. In max, XSI, C4D and even blender you expand the tree and you can immediately see pointgroups, subsets of components, assigned materials etc. It helps you read a scene quickly before you even start working on it. A large scene does not necessary mean large scale but often one object containing a large number of parts. Being able to manage that in one centralized interface can speed up preparing a large scene significantly.

OneBigTree
What I mean is for example grouping similar objects, restructuring hierarchies, turning copies into instances to reduce memory footprint, renaming objects from “part_297584_cd_VX-07” to “screw_iron” 1-250 with automatic numbering and so on. So you can quickly find and isolate any piece of geometry you want to work on.
Part of this is being able to see the most important properties of an object at a glance. In max, XSI, C4D and even blender you expand the tree and you can immediately see pointgroups, subsets of components, assigned materials etc. It helps you read a scene quickly before you even start working on it. A large scene does not necessary mean large scale but often one object containing a large number of parts. Being able to manage that in one centralized interface can speed up preparing a large scene significantly.

Exactly！That's a big weak point in houdini!

Greetings all,
I hope it's OK to resurrect this old thread.

I'm an experienced 3D generalist - but new to Houdini, currently exploring to see if its appropriate for my use as a one man studio.
My work is mainly complex product visualisation - so handling 'CAD originated' models with 1,000+ parts is not uncommon.

I'm therefore wondering if there have been any improvements relating to this matter and this discussion since the last post - Sept 2020.

Mike_A
I'm therefore wondering if there have been any improvements relating to this matter and this discussion since the last post - Sept 2020.

I'd suggest you to maybe start a new thread, play with it and ask specific questions, as this thread is very generic and you don't want your question to be lost

Everyone works differently and may be expecting something different from the software

I'm used to dealing with 1000s of "objects" represented as packed prims and seeing their material assignments or other attributes in spreadsheet, also procedurally edit hierarchy, names, material assignments, overrides, ... on all of them at once with predictable rules to avoid manual editing one by one or one time scripts which used to be the only option in C4D, XSI, Maya, MAX whenever I was using them

So when you need to update or run through different CAD or something, you don't have to do much of additional tweaking
Even though manual editing is always possible
So personally I feel much more productive than I ever was in XSI, Maya or C4D for those kind of needs
(even though nowadays they may also have more procedural control if you are using Bifrost or C4D scene nodes, ...)

By all that I mean don't take this thread as ultimate statement of the limitations as they are all form personal point of view of each artist and familiarity with the tools and Houdini specific workflows which may differ from other DCCs