Hello,

I'm a Maya user, I saw some of Houdini videos, and am impressed, although I prefer the Maya interface someway, but that wouldn't be a big problem.

I want an advice from previous Maya users who are using Houdini now, please don’t say how you feel when you are modeling or animating, I want the technical differences between the two, what dose Houdini offer to be better than Maya?

To be more specific, I'm a Character Modeler, Animator. What does Houdini offer to me?

Also, the built-in compositing system wouldn't interest me, nor the renderer, as we use RenderMAN for rendering, Shake for compositing and final touches. So be specific to the Animation, modeling tools please.

Thanks,
Character animator

For me it's simple.

True proceduralism.

A|W promised this *years* ago … never delivered.



–Mark

xionmark
For me it's simple.

True proceduralism.

A|W promised this *years* ago … never delivered.



–Mark

Hi,
And greetings to everybody
I'm newbie,considering character animation as my future carrier
and simply I want to know what exactly “True proceduralism.” means for char animators.

The Differences between Maya and Houdini are pretty big. Yes its totally procedural which is the biggest thing because then you can animate your modeling process or branch off Operation Chains and animate them without generating new geometry. The bone system is better in Houdini for one thing you can see the bones despite the fact that you are in shadded mode. For hair so far as I can tell you just use particles set to lines and emit them from the surface to create the hair which is great because it is not a post render effect like it is in maya. The Particle systems in Houdini are better than every other 3D package and this is why it is normally used at the big studio's for the special effects. Its very good at doing dissolves and such things. The procedural approach makes all your animation Non-Linear which you key into a linear graph which in turn can be manipulated by the trax editor in Houdini which is nothing like the trax editor in Maya. You move around the linear keys and such in the linear graph with the trax. The graph editor can also take equations to do the animation. So its concievable to do a whole animation with just two keys and an equation. Break out those old math skills. lol Then there is the fact that you have Vex and other tools for allowing you to create totally customised interfaces that control everything from surfaces, materials, lighing, shadows, particles, you name it with no coding what so ever. You simply drag and drop relationships to create a network so of like the Maya Shading system only much more advanced. You said you don't care about rendering because you use shake and RenderMan. Well Houdini is natively compatible with RenderMan so it does matter. You can build shaders graphically for RenderMan and render directly out to RenderMan from within Houdini. Their compositor does do RenderMan also not just Mantra. You can bake out more layers in Houdini than you can in Maya. My biggest thing is that Houdini is not extremely buggy like Maya. You never know in maya if this operation will work this time like surface miscalculations where there is an invisible bubble where the camera can pass in and out of when its in that bubble it can reneder the surface when its out side of it the surface can not be rendered. Aliaswavefront's solution to this is to delete the surface and start all over. Then there is the Boolean that work part of the time and if you are talking about Nurb booleans well then they do not work most of the time. Then there is the whole IK where some joints will rotate on translate but not others not matter which system you choose. Then there is the whole thing about grouping, or using a lattice on surfaces that are attached to the skeleton. They tend to get ripped off the skeleton. I could go on and on for pages about the bugs in Maya but I have a life so I will just stop there. In Houdini 5.5 it seems to be solid as a rock. I never have to worry about the software craping out on me. 6 is buggy but its beta too. Even in Beta its alot more solid than Maya is. I have not found any post rendering effects in Houdini so far which is a very good thing.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Interesting post MatrixNAN, I really enjoyed reading it,

One little thing that every major 3D package supports RenderMAN, as it’s the industry standard renderer.

When you said: “You can build shaders graphically for RenderMan and render directly out to RenderMan from within Houdini. Their compositor does do RenderMan also not just Mantra”

Do you mean that you can build shaders using Houdini's (I don’t know the name of the material creator, so lets just say Houdini's Hypershade or Multilister) and then render them out to renderman, you can do that with maya too, but it wont give you the same greate results when you create them with SLIM, and if you can within Houdini with out the quality and projection affected, then I shall consider using renderman just as a renderer, if I decided to transition to Houdini, note that the renderman shading language is the best ever, although it needs some scripting sometimes, but once you learn it you well never use the graphical interface ever.

You also said: ((I could go on and on for pages about the bugs in Maya)), I do agree with that, but not that much, Maya is a very powerful, comprehensive package, and the programmers at A|W wouldn't release a buggy version.

It seems that you are using Houdini for a while, we all have strong (also strange) relations with our packages, but am really considering to try Houdini.

As I told you, I prefer the Maya interface, but that might change, am considering to get an Octane with IRIX installed, where can I see Houdini running on IRIX ?

And is there's something similar to Maya's HotBox in Houdini ?

one last thing: Did you use Maya? I mean as a professional or a talented user?
thanks again ..

Yours,
Character Animator

Hey,

“One little thing that every major 3D package supports RenderMAN, as it’s the industry standard renderer.

When you said: ”You can build shaders graphically for RenderMan and render directly out to RenderMan from within Houdini. Their compositor does do RenderMan also not just Mantra“

Do you mean that you can build shaders using Houdini's (I don’t know the name of the material creator, so lets just say Houdini's Hypershade or Multilister) and then render them out to renderman, you can do that with maya too, but it wont give you the same greate results when you create them with SLIM, and if you can within Houdini with out the quality and projection affected, then I shall consider using renderman just as a renderer, if I decided to transition to Houdini, note that the renderman shading language is the best ever, although it needs some scripting sometimes, but once you learn it you well never use the graphical interface ever. ”

->Yes this is what I mean and you can write your own and do programming operations as operators also. Such as loops, ifs, case, etc … There is really little difference between coding and the graphical only that I think the graphical is faster. Seems like its close to the same level of detail as the coding a 1 to 1 correlation. I have not actually written a renderman shader yet. Its on my list of things to do soon.

“You also said: ((I could go on and on for pages about the bugs in Maya)), I do agree with that, but not that much, Maya is a very powerful, comprehensive package, and the programmers at A|W wouldn't release a buggy version.

It seems that you are using Houdini for a while, we all have strong (also strange) relations with our packages, but am really considering to try Houdini.”

->I have actually used maya more, but I am leaning towards Houdini as my favorite package. Houdini is much more complex and you tend to have a much finer control as a result of detail you have to go through to do an operation.

“As I told you, I prefer the Maya interface, but that might change, am considering to get an Octane with IRIX installed, where can I see Houdini running on IRIX ?”

->http://www.sidefx.com/support/system/index.html [sidefx.com]


“And is there's something similar to Maya's HotBox in Houdini ?”

->The tab key is the closest thing to the hot box key but its a very different system its more like a throw back to the old animation systems interface where you have the multiple screens. There is a total of 8 screens so its very different but you can make the views and windows follow the different screens automatically however you like. The Old 3DS R3 had the multiple screens if you ever used that. It was around the time of T2.

“one last thing: Did you use Maya? I mean as a professional or a talented user?”

->Both. Small contracts. lol Believe it or not I have even used low end programs such as Blender for extreme low budget projects. 3D interactive help etc. I am a 3D animator/programmer. Mostly Talented User because at this point I am in my senior year at MTSU as a Digital Animation. A small group of some of the most talented mtsu students and professionals are forming a small company in the Nashville area for doing 3D Animation contracts and other graphics contracts. So I focus on modeling, lighting, animation, and rigging.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler 8) :wink:

There is a total of 8 screens so its very different but you can make the views and windows follow the different screens automatically however you like.

I don't think Houdini has had a fixed number of “screens” since Houdini 4 …

SOPs,SHOPs,POPS,COPS,ROPS,CHOPS,VOPs and OBJs Screens/Modes of Working whatever you want to call it. They have Desktops too. Its all just lingo.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

I don't know if I'm qualified to chime in but I'm goign to anyway ;p

In Maya, when animating, you work with joints. In Houdini it seems you are actually working with bones. It was a bit confusing to me at first, but the way bones are set up in Houdini takes away at least one major headache you have in Maya; Joint Orientation. I think I greatly prefer rigging in Houdini based on this alone, but Houdini also has a ton of other nifty Character Animation features. Keep in mind I haven't touched Maya in a long , long time so I don't know if or how well Maya does any of this…

I mentioned this on another forum, and it may not seem like a big deal, but the fact that Houdini actaully makes a true distinction for it's users between object and world space is a great feature, especially for animators.

IK Switching, it's a snap to change IK solutions on a bone Chain.

Houdini actually has two types of FK, an FK which is like single bone IK and NoK which is just the bones.

You can do some nifty trickery with Spline IK in Houdini with SOP networks because it's real easy to manipulate the spline that's controling the IK solution. I haven't tried a whole lot out myself but with the procedural networks in Houdini it seems like you could proabably do things like set up a switch to cycle though different splines for different levels of control on a single spline IK chain, or you could change the size of the spline easily, etc.

You get true FK/IK Blending with a clever little handle.

The visual appearance of bone chains change dependent on whether an IK solution is applied.

There's quite a nice selection of handle types for manipulaing bones.

Houdini allows you to do dynamic parenting.

You have a ridiculous ammount of control over your channels. Channels or segments of channels can be controlled by any expression, including relationships with other channels in the scene, and the process for manipulating channel and channel segments is streamlined. There's no relationship editor and you don't have to dig through anything to just apply an expression. It's as simple as drag and drop or selecting the segment you want to affect and typing your expression into the field at the bottom of the channel editor.

I don't think I've found anything I couldn't animte in Houdini. In Maya I can recall creating custom attributes and hooking thiose up to existing parameters via expressions because the parameters weren't animatable. None of that in Houdini, however should the need arise you can create spare channels.

You can blend capture weights easily.

Blendshapes, I've never used them in Maya but have seen posts on other boards about people struggling with them. In Houdini it's easy to set up blendshapes and custom controls, it's easy to set up your netwrok in such a way that everything gets merged and fused before being captured to a rig, and because you still have access to the whole network you can go back and make changes at will without worrying too much about breaking anything.

If you don't like typing, you've got CHOPs which is a great way to visually build expressions or filters to control channels.

You never have to go into your network editor to clean up nodes you don't want, except for modeling really, and that's just like deleting history. The network editor in Houdini is much, much cleaner and easier to follow than the Hypergraph, so consequently when looking at a rig, you get a crystal clear view of exactly what's going on. You'll never be looking at op tiles in Houdini's network editor wondering “WTF is this? I didn't put this here. Do I need this? What does this do? Can I delete it?” This clarity of scene networks extends through every aspect of the program.

You say you don't care about the compositor, and if you asked me a few months ago I would have agreed, now I can't live without it.

You're using PRMan, fine, but don't discount Mantra. People who use both hold Mantra in high esteem and it compares very favorably with PRMan. Mantra seems to be every bit the production renderer PRMan is; it's probably the next best thing to it as their outputs seem quite similar and they have similar feature sets.

You also say you prefer Maya's UI, but you'll probably change that tune after spending some time with Houdini. It's deffinitely the most flexible UI available. When I started I really missed marking menus, but the context senstive menus and tab menu do a good job a filling that gap, and I ended up putting the OPs I use most often on hotkeys anyway.

If you're the type of polymodeler who needs MJ PolyTools features, you probably won't be too happy, but Houdini does have some nice modeling features that maya does not. You have a real soft selection, and you can do magnet deformations, for a couple things and you'll probably love the Ray SOP.As far as MJ Poly Tools like features, there's no loop select or 3/5 quads or anything like that, but the dissolve SOP and Polysplit SOP are pretty flexible so you won't be stiing there triangulating faces, flipping edges and then turning them back into quads. Just dissolve the edges that need to be fixed, and resplit the faces.

OK, I think I'm done for now.

I forgot, this was actually why I replied:

character animator
As I told you, I prefer the Maya interface, but that might change, am considering to get an Octane with IRIX installed, where can I see Houdini running on IRIX ?

Here's a picture of 5.5 on an Octane. Houdini 6 looks ever so slightly different. It looks a bit better.

http://home.earthlink.net/~mdcronin1/images/hoirix.jpg [home.earthlink.net]

And is there's something similar to Maya's HotBox in Houdini ?

No, and it's not necessary. Houdini's interface is a pretty wide departure from every other 3D program out there. The tab menu is quite clever though. You hit tab and a menu containing all the available OPs pops up. If you don't wat to surf through the list you just start typing the OP's name and it pops out of the list. You can also make little custom op groups for one's you use alot.

MatrixNAN, MichaelC thanks for your great posts ..

While searching for houdini learning media, I found this ..
http://web0.futureforums.co.uk/houdini/pages/community/index.html [web0.futureforums.co.uk]

I'm very pleased to know that Side Effects really cares about educating the customers for free, A|W doesn't, the only free learning media are the (How to's) which are old, and discussing very basic concepts ..

I noticed that Houdini's interfaces are almost the same in both (Windows & IRIX), while Maya is somehow different in IRIX (I think better than windows), I guess leaving a package like Maya would be a hard decision especially that am using it for years, but if you don’t like what you're doing (using the correct set of tools) you'll never be creative enough to catch up with the demanding needs ..

Why I can't see any real life animations done by Houdini? I mean like “Bingo”, or “The End”? And if Houdini is the best, why did Square use Maya as a main modeling, character animation tool for creating their historical animation (Final Fantasy: The spirits within)?

Or Ice age? Why only Maya and RenderMAN used? Why I don’t hear much about Houdini?
If you would say it’s the price, I wouldn't agree, because if a studio can afford Maya Unlimited (7000 $) as a Modeling, animation tool, and RenderMAN (10.000 $) that’s ten thousand dollars, as a rendering, shading tool, and also Shake as a compositing tool, how they can't afford Houdini?, and as you said MatrixNAN and also you MichaelC that Houdini's renderer is almost as RenderMAN's power and functionality, and you can't live without the powerful compositing system MichaelC ? Which means that a studio wont need any other package if they purchse Houdini.

I do believe that Houdini is very comprehensive, but tell my why it is not being used by the major studios?, and why Pixar Animation Studios (the leadership with its Marionette, and RenderMAN) made a special version of RenderMAN created just for Maya, I mean why did they care about Maya specifically (the other software used to connect to RenderMAN are created by other companies, not Pixar), and you all should know that Pixar uses Maya beside their in-house animation system (Marionette), why not Houdini?

That would be all ..

Yours,
Character Animator

Well you haven't seen much in the way of Character work in Houdini because it's a realitively new feature for them. From what I understand, Houdini only started to expand into Character tools seriously less than 2 years ago with Version 5. I've only been using Houdini since last summer with 5.5 and the character tools seemed adequite, but now with version 6 I'm realizing how really great the tools are.

Final Fantasy, I know for a fact began production before Maya was even available in Beta form. I worked at a company that beta tested Maya 1, and prior to that one of our animators was offered a job working on that movie. Square was using Power Animator 7.5.1 and Softimage 3.6 at the time, and eventually went to Maya around version 2, but still stuck with SI 3.8 as well. At the time production started Houdini was at version 1 and it wasn't a good option for Character work. Going from Power Animator to Maya wasn't a big deal because the two packages were so similar.

I'm betting the story is similar with movies like Ice Age. These movies can be in production for 3-5 years. Once production starts, and a pipeline is established, these companies aren't likely to make any massive upgrades to the off the shelf software they may be using. ILM just recently finally upgraded from SI to XSI for example. How long has XSI been out? 3 or 4 years? Also, in a lot of cases, the pipeline isn't really centered around the “best” tool for the job, but sometimes it's just a matter of what software the leads are most comfortable with, or the software that's easiest to find talent to operate, or the software that seems the least expensive initially, or some combination of those factors.

You see alot of Maya Character animation because it's been a character tool from day one, and previous to that Power Animator was a Character tool. Things like Bingo were actually made by people at A|W to demonstrate Maya's character tools. SideFX seems to be determined to establish Houdini as a complete solution for animation, not just an effects tool, so I'm sure you'll start seeing more and more character work done with Houdini, and there are companies out there like Core who are already doing lots of character work with Houdini.

As for why Pixar supports Maya directly, that's easy to understand. Pixar wants to sell that renderer. Maya is probably the most popular tool for film work, but it doesn't have what could be classified as a production class renderer, not even with MR built in, simply because neither Maya's old software renderer or MR for Maya are true distributed renderers. Pixar filled that hole. So for studios using Maya, PRMan has become the renderer of choice, and Pixar is selling plenty of licenses.

Lastly, Maya's UI may look different on Irix, but it's functionally identical. The reason why Maya looks different from Win32 to Linux to Irix to OSX is because it uses the API, for lack of a better word, to draw all it's Windows and dialogues. So on whatever OS you are using, Maya and everything related to it, will use whatever window decorations and behaviour you have applied to your OS. Houdini seems to just use the API to draw the main program Window, and then it takes care of the rest. Everything in Houdini is accelerated by Open GL, even dialogue boxes, and it looks and acts the same on all platforms. Even on Windows it acts like a Unix program, and that's a small hurdle for some people.

Another thing about Houdini and PRMan is, that Houdini's output to RIB is way better than Pixar's own RAT.
The best on the market actually.
I don't have any hard proof of it since I never used PRMan seriously but I know it for sure.
I know, my words sound a bit shallow but there were a lot of talk about it on SideFX mailing list and many of pros out there were saying that.
Thay hang out here too and I'm sure if some of them stumble upon this post tey will proove me right.

YOU: Well you haven't seen much in the way of Character work in Houdini because it's a realitively new feature for them. From what I understand, Houdini only started to expand into Character tools seriously less than 2 years ago with Version 5. I've only been using Houdini since last summer with 5.5 and the character tools seemed adequite, but now with version 6 I'm realizing how really great the tools are.

>> I guess not, (new feature for them), we are not talking about hobbyists or singal artists, but about major studios who spends thousands on training, a guess the word NEW wouldn’t fit !, and please note that I don’t know much about Houdini, and I suppose that you are a pro, so please we are both beyond the fact of being loyal to specific companies, we are seeking the best in the market to provide the best for our coustomers.

YOU: Final Fantasy, I know for a fact began production before Maya was even available in Beta form. I worked at a company that beta tested Maya 1, and prior to that one of our animators was offered a job working on that movie. Square was using Power Animator 7.5.1 and Softimage 3.6 at the time, and eventually went to Maya around version 2, but still stuck with SI 3.8 as well. At the time production started Houdini was at version 1 and it wasn't a good option for Character work. Going from Power Animator to Maya wasn't a big deal because the two packages were so similar.

>> Maya is a part of power animator, as a matter of fact, Maya is a collection of existing and new tools combined when Alias merged with Wavefront under SGI, so, my point is that Maya has the same tools found at power animator, but they are more advanced. Talking a bout SoftImage, am not defending on Maya, or any specific package, Don’t forget that I posted here to check the possibility of transiting to Houdini, am not trying to prove anything here, not the most powerful or least or anything, I do believe that the artist is the one key not the software ..

>> I didn't understand what you said, what do you mean by saying: ((You see alot of Maya Character animation because it's been a character tool from day one, and previous to that Power Animator was a Character tool. Things like Bingo were actually made by people at A|W to demonstrate Maya's character tools. SideFX seems to be determined to establish Houdini as a complete solution for animation, not just an effects tool)), is Houdini still unfinished? Or maybe beta, but in a new name? Every major package has effects, character animation tools, Power Animator is from the same company, what do you expect? What difference dose it make if the package has character tools from day one or two? The point is: what you get from your software? How easy? And how fast?

You: "As for why Pixar supports Maya directly, that's easy to understand. Pixar wants to sell that renderer. Maya is probably the most popular tool for film work, but it doesn't have what could be classified as a production class renderer, not even with MR built in, simply because neither Maya's old software renderer or MR for Maya are true distributed renderers. Pixar filled that hole. So for studios using Maya, PRMan has become the renderer of choice, and Pixar is selling plenty of licenses"

>> Well .. MR isn't that bad, you probably didn't even try to render with it, now it's fully integrated with Maya 5.0 providing direct access from within Maya, just as XSI. For Maya being the most popular, tell me, do you know that Pixar uses Maya too in their productions? (refer to http://www.pixar.com [pixar.com] to make sure), Is it because it's popular too? Or maybe cheap?

You also said: “Lastly, Maya's UI may look different on Irix, but it's functionally identical.”

>> That’s exactly what I said, I didn't mention anything related to the functionality, what I was trying to say is that I prefer Maya on IRIX, which means that I prefer the IRIX GUI style .. and also, am sure you know that IRIX is the best OS for visualization, some people call it (the historical visualization system), as it fully supports OpenGL 1.2, and the graphics cards provided by SGI are the best choice ever, MXE, and the new VPRO ..

if possible provide me with the most complex and amaizing animations made with Houdini, the ones hard to be done in other packages (weather fully CGI or combined with a film) ..


Stremik
Another thing about Houdini and PRMan is, that Houdini's output to RIB is way better than Pixar's own RAT.
The best on the market actually.

am waiting for the prove.

I guess not, (new feature for them), we are not talking about hobbyists or singal artists, but about major studios who spends thousands on training, a guess the word NEW wouldn't fit !

Bear in mind that there are a few distinctions to be made when it comes to character work. The more insignificant the character, the more likely it will go to Maya 100% as the rig has to be developed to a point where the character moves in a believable fashion.

For full-blown feature animation, it is a whole different story. The character rig is the key and tools the software gives you to help out in this area are of primal importance. This is where MEL integration in to Maya is brilliant. It has taken Houdini several years of constant improvement to reach this stage, probably because Side Effects realised this and focused on improving the UI to the state where they could add those tools to rig a character without a mel-like programming language.

Pixar uses proprietary tools for animating their features. So does PDI. These are the two big successfull Animation shops, right? Why don't they use Maya for animating charcters? Training, costs, and a proven workflow with existing tools. In-house tools are already developed and Maya presents nothing new to them, so why switch? That is currently Houdini's problem. The classic chicken vs. egg problem. ILM has their own tools as well but for animation, they work with both Maya and Soft, but just for pushing bones around and generating animation channels to a great extent.

If a character animator for feature film is presented with a well implemented rig and workflow and they can meet their production quota's, then they will be happy. It is meeting the production quota's that concerns experienced animators the most so when presented with a new package to animate in, they have severe reservations and deservedly so. It is up to the riggers to settle the animators down by listening to their needs and providing the production tools to deliver the shots.

I am convinced that you can rig successfully in Softimage, XSI, Maya and now Houdini as well. All the packages have the proper hooks to do this now.

so, my point is that Maya has the same tools found at power animator, but they are more advanced.

No, you are wrong. The biggest complaint with Maya1 was that it did not have the full complement of PA tools. As a matter of fact, it was sorely lacking on the NURBs side and took release 2.5 to finally get the basic subset of tools in place. They promised interactive viewport rendering IPR but users had to wait over a year to get that in place. As for particles, they still don't duplicate Dynamation's power and flexibility without extensive MEL programming. The particles are easier to use though. Many more shortcomings in maya 1.

The point is that Maya was not nearly as complete as you claimit was when released.

Why Maya clobbered Soft is simple. Speed. Sure wasn't cost. Maya truly was 3x faster and more than Soft was at the time. It also had mel so you could customize the tool to suit many styles of character rigging. It also didn't happen that Soft had a new owner every year, or so it seemed.
Utilizing the OpenGL talent at SGI, Alias programmers were able to take advantage of efficiencies in OpenGL that fit with their character workflow. Houdini didn't implement OpenGL improvements untill it's second and third major releases. Remember that first siggraph with the robot kicking the can? The playback was phenomenal for the time, and it kicked the can to boot! The large studios could measure the savings in time. A no brainer to switch with no matching offering from Soft. Even given this, there were still Soft die-hards who wouldn't switch for various reasons that baffled me at the time but time has given me new insight: Very few of us are capable of real change once a certain comfort level is attained. Protecting that comfort level becomes a primary daily activity unless pushed to the brink. Oh well, to each his own.

Don't forget that I posted here to check the possibility of transiting to Houdini, am not trying to prove anything here, not the most powerful or least or anything, I do believe that the artist is the one key not the software.

Exactly. Experience is the key. Experience gives you the opportunity to choose different methods with experience to back up each decision. If the animator is worrying about posing a character and pushing him through the shot rather than worrying about how the character is behaving, the problem generally is with the animator.

If your choices are truly being hampered by the software, then seek alternatives, like Houdini.

I have witnessed many animators transition from other packages to Houdini for series production work. It is interesting to see who succeeds and who doesn't. Out of all the animators (around 100 now), only four or five bailed claming that Houdini was too much, and that would have been with Houdini v3! They all seemed to get frustrated and were extremely resistant to change in any way, shape or form. The current success rate is much much better. Only two in the last year and that is with outdated rigs in one specific case.

The point is: what you get from your software? How easy? And how fast?

You have to add in the change factor; the point of view of transitioning packages. Houdini is now in the same field as maya for animation (pros and cons to both) but doesn't present a radical improvement (3x or more) in speed and efficiency. You will continue to use your existing tool then. If you wanted to tap in to Houdini's procedural power, then the transition is worth it as you don't need to master mel to do the advanced stuff like muscles and advanced tertiary animation effects.

Well .. MR isn't that bad, you probably didn't even try to render with it, now it's fully integrated with Maya 5.0 providing direct access from within Maya, just as XSI.

MR has the same problem with PRMan that houdini has to crack in to the Maya market for Feature Film. It is already established and MR doesn't provide that 3x or more increase in efficiency (speed) or cost-effectiveness. As a matter of fact, with GI in renderman, MR has slipped back a bit in that regard. Yes, MR has implemented better motion blur now but in order to get that magic 3x multiplier, they will have to be on par and then cost practically nothing to use. This is fine for Mantra as Side Effects gives mantra for free but they sell Houdini. Mental Images has MR as their only base for income so therein lies their dilemma.

The proof is in the adoption of the RAT tools. At $10,000 US a pop, it is certainly not a cheep option. Many shops use Houdini as the pipe to generate the RIB to forgo this expense and just pass maya data through the non-graphic houdini called hscript to output rib. Varies by team and by facility. It seems that every TD has his own way of doing things that works for them. Is it the most flexible way? Doesn't matter to them if it gets the job done. Yes there are other solutions to output RIB from Houdini but they too cost money and rib output is not brilliant.

Smaller shops using Maya and not satisified with it's renderer now have two options: PRMAN or MR. Good for them that this choice now exists.

Feature film is an entirely different beast. Proven production shaders for PRMan can now contain GI calls to heighten the realism, and the render times. No new programming language to learn for those shader writers. Don't have to rewrite 100's of shaders to support a new paradigm as MR presents the shader writer. Cost of implementing MR is then too prohibitive for many teams at the SFX shops.

Pixar filled that hole. So for studios using Maya, PRMan has become the renderer of choice, and Pixar is selling plenty of licenses"

What hole? I thought that PRMan was always the renderer of choice. :wink:

Broadcast, yes RAT makes sense at that cost. Feature film. Sorry. The hardened shader writers for Features generally use vi-vim or emacs as their shader tool of choice. FYI vim and emacs are raw programming shell text editors. They see those GUI tools as an impedement, not a productivity boost. You either know how to write shaders, or you use RAT. Who do you think will develop the better, more efficient custom shaders?

One note, I consider the VEX Builder in Houdini to be extremely close to writing shaders. An amazing tool that generates excellent shader code to learn and presents the best stepping-stone to get in to writing programmable shaders if that is one of your goals. The VEX language is so close to PRMan's shader language that it is frustrating when you need to use both tools daily. Remembering all the subtle differences, that is.

if possible provide me with the most complex and amaizing animations made with Houdini, the ones hard to be done in other packages (weather fully CGI or combined with a film) ..

Now we are running in the bullshit part of this industry. This will quickly become a pissing contest that I don't really care for.

Let's look at it from a SFX team point of view. A team has to put out a bunch of shots along side other teams. Wether that team is technically (users) or politically (TD lead) motivated to use a particular package, so be it. Some teams do characters while others wrap the SFX around those characters, others just do clean SFX shots. One team animates a character, perhaps doing the skinning or the muscles, textures, etc. or not is an issue.

It is better to look at the failures as an indication of true limitations. We all learn from those! Nothing like a kick in the teeth to make you think twice next time, if you don't have anyone or anything else to blame that is.

These teams also go in over their heads occasionally and try to do some of the SFX for that character or shot, say feathers on a hero bird. They program the snot out of the package trying to lay feathers on a bird but proceed to spend 6 months and countles amounts of $$$ in the process. Finally a Houdini team, already ahead of it's schedule volunteers to tackle that part, and succeeds. They even get some partial animation!

Example 1: The phoenix in HP2

Now we have a serpant that has to have particles run down it's surface in a believable way accessing painted texture maps like displacements, force and drag. Get some animation too!

Example 2: Serpant in HP2

It just isn't cost effective to use Houdini talent to animate given the lack of users out there.

There are countless other examples where Houdini was used to play a vital supporting role in characters where if Houdini were not in the equation, a sub-standard solution would have to had been developed with costly R&D talent. R&D just aren't as creative as artists as most of their time is devoted to providing a solution, a single solution and little is left for the creative side of the craft and they are left somewhat frustrated. Pray to GOD that the solution works. Hope that paper we are copying works under all circumstances solution. R&D just doesn't have the cycles to execute alternate creative options. Houdini technical artists do. The experimental nature of houdini's networks support this concept time and again. Houdini showcases the artists' true talent and quickly becomes a transparent solution, except when a bug is encountered. Off to support to get it fixed… In a couple days! Even sooner if it impacts production seriously.

Generally, if Maya fails, Houdini is there to pick up and move the shots to completion but at a cost as the Houdini teams are generally challenged with the most difficult shots to begin with.

Alias have and will continue to spend millions to help develop their market presence, but in the end, is that money being spent on developing the package for Feature Film? Maya artists don't seem to care all that much as the product is affordable now and the character tools are robust enough . It is a completely other story for the CTO's of those large companies who see maintenance fees spent away in areas not critical to their own needs. This is evolving right now as a serious dynamic in many of the large shops. How much cheaper can Maya get. Free? If Alias sees the Film market as a lost-leader, then yes.

We need more competent Houdini artists in this community, plain and simple. :?

Another thing about Houdini and PRMan is, that Houdini's output to RIB is way better than Pixar's own RAT.
The best on the market actually.

am waiting for the prove.

If you can read rib, the proof is right there. Read the RenderMan companion and Advanced RenderMan books. Then read our rib. It is readable! It makes sense. Try reading MTOR's rib… :wink: They both create nice pictures through PRMan. One is in a format that you can actually maintain efficiently inside a pipeline. Read as: “Large shops like maintainable rib and small facilities simply don't have the resources (talent) to work at that level.”

One interesting development in recent months is that some new features in PRMAN seem to be predicated on supporting RAT and MTOR. Is this in the best interest of generating clean rib? Does PIXAR see this as a requirement for RAT and MTOR? Given the audience that uses these tools, probably not that great a concern. Feature Film artists? Unknown right now.
Go to a SIGGRAPH RenderMan user group, when they ask the perrenial question: “Who writes their own shaders”, half the group raises their hands. It just so happens that many of them are waring the familar black Houdini “T-ees”. The other half giggles and laughs that they don't have to write code. >>> Maya users… :x I guess those PRMAN users are proud of their ignorance. In a way, you don't want an artist writing his/her own shaders so MTOR is a blessing.


Maya and Houdini are great tools. Houdini just let's you do more without learning to read or write code. From an animator's point of view, this could be quite liberating depending on what they want to do with their characters. The plethora of MEL scripts on the web are great, but they do have a cost if they fall over in some cases.

What do you want to do with your character today?

Well this has turned into an interesting discussion.

When I said “Pixar filled that hole” I was talking about the gripes so many Maya users have about Maya's renderer, and the less than complete support of MR for Maya. Studios wanted to use Maya and they wanted to use PRMan, so Pixar gave them everything they needed to get the two working together nicely. Even though Maya has MR built in now, I don't think that'll take too many clients away from Pixar. I know PRMan has always been the leader, and I don't think that will change unless Pixar drops the ball on hardware rendering.

Maya 1 deffinitely was not a good replacement for PA. I know the people I was working with were deffinitely not happy with it. The reason why I mentioned all that about Final Fantasy was because I was tying to answer the question you seem to have “If Houdini is so great for characters, how come no one is using it?” It's because Houdini wasn't an obvious choice when most of the projects that use off the shelf software you are seeing today were started, Houdini has been pigeon-holed as an effects package, and people are resitant to change. I think old_school has some great points, additionally;

Maya and PA were character tools form day one. A|W built tools specificly for character animators from the outset, and aggressively went after character animators by demoing animations like Bingo, while Houdini was mainly considered an effects package. It seems to be a stigma that SESI is trying to shake. Side FX has some great character tools in Houdini now, however animators aren't really aware of this. There still is this perception that you just can't do characters well in Houdini. If you go to any forum on the net and ask what the strong points of Maya and Houdini are, you'll get a ton of answers from people who just aren't familiar with Houdini saying things like “If you want to build an Alien, use Maya, if you want to blow him up use Houdini.” There may have been some truth to that in the past, but I think Houdini 6 is as capable as Maya for character work; more capable in some respects maybe less capable in others. Mainly it just comes down to people's preceptions. Because SideFX didn't make a huge effort to satisfy the needs of character animators from the begining with Houdini, Maya has the lead, and many people like yourself wonder if it's even possible to create characters in Houdini. :wink:

I wasn't trying to put down Maya or MR or XSI, when I was talking about PRMan. I've used MR here and there and I like Maya very much. My point was that if you want dsitributed rendering, which I think is a pretty critical feature for a renderer in a production environment, you have to buy the standalone version of MR for Maya. The free or built in version of MR for Maya does not support this, and thus can't really be considered a production renderer, despite how nice the output might be. If you are going to get a standalone renderer for Maya, it's probably cheaper and better in the long run to go with PRMan though the initial cost is higher than Mental Ray.

I didn't understand you were just talking about the “look” of the GUI in Irix. If you just want something that looks like Irix, you can use Window Blinds on your Windows OS, or set up KDE to look and basicly act like Irix in Linux. There's also a Window Manager for Linux that's recently become available that supposively looks and acts just like Irix, but it's name escapes me. I don't know that SGI hardware or Irix is any better or worse for visualization, and I think there's a lot of doubt in the industry as well evidenced by all the companies using Linux or Sun workstations and servers, especially when you've got 64 bit CPUs and Operating systems on the horizon for average PC users. My only SGI experience is with very old hardware. The newest SGI I've used is like 5 years old. If you use Windows or Linux and you have a pro graphics card that's certified for the software you use, you are all set, I think.