If I can say something about what embarrassing me in Houdini is not a lack of good ready shaders or something like that, because as I understand for most serious Houdini users (economic sources for SESI) this is not a problem and my needs aren't so urgent. That ‘s clear.

but…

I work now on geo with 300 000 points and it is clear for me that I can’t work comfortable with such geometry in Houdini and that really drives me madness! This is not so heavy geo nowadays, you now.

Ok this is not true actually. Because I can do anything I want with it super efficiently: I can render it in 8K, trace reflection, trace occulusion, use terabytes of texture, instant in 1000s copies, motion blur, apply Dops transform of proxy geo etc etc etc except ONE:

I can't normally work on it in viewport, cut into pieces, groups, deletes some parts, triangulates, use xtransorm, hand animate. It just takes some much time to select one group, apply transformation in SOPs (obj trans. works fine). I can't normally do the easiest thing on 8xcore machine. Madness.


well, Houdini is a hard love.
sy.

yeah I figured I needed to vop my own light … for what I was trying to do it really wasn't worth it but eventually I need to make my own max-i-fy'd version of a light.

One really cool thing to do is to make an asset that shows cones for point-instanced spot-lights, and also inherits the point's colors as the light color. I'll make a demo video of that asset and post a link in a few days.

u_ayad
- No way to use “ready to use” shaders from mental ray or Renderman , otherwise you should spend hours to write shaders that already exist elsewhere and can be modified easily . getting Prman or mental ray working in Houdini=computers lessons .

- Limited types of lights .

In conclusion this soft is still for a limited circle of C++ users , and i don't see efforts made to open it for designers . We are now in the 21th century.

Regards

Haha. this was my initial thought when i was introduced to houdini.. until i realised what its all about, its pretty straightforward to knock up a renderman shader (just like a mantra one) with the renderman addon. and then i`m sure youll find the built in shaders of other packages a bit limited and frustrating.. Houdini is way ahead of most current 3d packages in so many respects.