Hello,

I think this comparison has been made several times in this forum, but before going to Siggrah, I'd like to convince my company how Houdini is interesting.

Could you give me your advices about the strengths and weaknesses of Houdini compared to Maya ?

Thanks.

Houdini and Maya are exactly alike. Houdini and Maya are completely differen It all comes down to your company's needs. Do you have a large staff? Small staff? Do you have programmers and/or a R&D team? Do you have mainly artists with a support TD or two?

Give us a better frame of reference then we might be able to answer the question a little better.

Well if you have time (money) to invest in good training, houdini is the choice. At least I think like that. I stopped working in maya almost completely (in fact I use it because I cannot buy houdini license yet) and I just learn more and more about houdini It is tough, but rewarding. If you already have a maya pipeline… well try to learn apprentice edition first and then show how things can be done in houdini. Success is inevitable I think 8)

Specially with v9 very closed on the horizon.

Wolfwood
Houdini and Maya are exactly alike. Houdini and Maya are completely differen It all comes down to your company's needs. Do you have a large staff? Small staff? Do you have programmers and/or a R&D team? Do you have mainly artists with a support TD or two?

Staff : between 30 and 50 CG artists
R&D : only me
TDs : 3 hard coders, and an artist/light coder

Houdini is a pipeline in a box. Maya is a box that you have to build a pipeline for.

oodini
Staff : between 30 and 50 CG artists
R&D : only me
TDs : 3 hard coders, and an artist/light coder

To me that would be a hard sell. In the *long* run Houdini would come out on top, with such a small number of coders Houdini would help reduce some of that burden. (Not to mention better asset management). However switching 30-50 CG artist over to Houdini would be a huge cost up front. In training, and more or less throwing out all the tools that have developed for Maya up until this point.

You would do well to maybe pick up a seat or two of Houdini and use it to the really tough problems. (Plus lots of free mantra tokens) Then slowly integrate it in with the artist. But doing a big, “WE ARE GOING ALL HOUDINI!! WOO WOO!” is going to be rough.

My worthless 2 cents.

My worthless 2 cents.

I guess that's inflation at work against you. Too much of Wolfwood's 2c

twod
I guess that's inflation at work against you. Too much of Wolfwood's 2c

Indeed…but see how much I've helped the Canadian dollar?

Actually his two cents is worth quite a bit more these days with the Canadian exchange rate.

But yeah, I agree, convincing your boss to pickup maybe one Master license and one or two Escape licenses plus a bunch of Mantra tokens will probably be the way to go. If you guys are going to Siggraph convincing them shouldn't be too hard. Just check out the booth presentations, the free experts panel on Moday at 1 PM, or the user group on Tuesaday night. If they go back to the old User Group Meeting format with presentations of recent work, you'll surely see some pretty clever stuff that'll have your boss scratching his head and wondering if it's even possible to do something like that in Maya.

Sorry it's not really an answer to your question, but in my experience no bullet point list is going to convince your boss to shell out money on new software. You just have to show them. Maybe what you could do is take a recent project or part of a recent project and rework it in APprentice and present it as a case study to your boss. Show them how this tool could've improved that project or saved them money. Think down the road, show them how you can easily build reusable tools without having to maintain thousands of lines of C++ or MEL.

The biggest complaint is usually the cost of training. If you could build a tool that accomplishes something very complex, and show your boss that you can hand this tool off to some junior artist with Escape, and within minutes have them generating this very complex effect with just a bit of instruction, that might help a bit as well.

plus a bunch of Mantra tokens

Mantra has free unlimited tokens both with Master and Escape. For me this is enough to consider Houdini as a final stage in any film/commercial/TV pipeline. There is literary no other renderer of such quality out there which is added to your host app for free.

We can argue if Maya still surpasses Houdini in some respects but this doesn't concern Houdini as layout/shading/lighting/rendering tool. That's for sure!

Try to build efficient render farm on any other decent render engine and count! No comparison with any. The problem could be content creation process. Does Houdini can be as efficient in modeling texturing etc as Maya? H9 will answer these questions.

cheers,
sy.

Houdini is a pipeline in a box. Maya is a box that you have to build a pipeline for

One of the best quotes Ive seen for a while , nearly as good “ Dneg isn't a company its a state of mind ”

R