circusmonkey
… Sidefx should of got in there and given away licences like softimage did ! Thats the only reason xsi got used …
.

uh there was a *lot* more to it than that…
last time I was there they only had h4. snuck some of it into a couple of
max projects but it was totally unsupported, discouraged, etc.

digitallysane
I actually think Houdini leaves XSI in the dust when it comes to character animation. …

except for speed. its the usual speed vs control thing;
for standard modeling, texturing, key-framing and rendering speed wins, if that's what you're selling.

-cpb

uh there was a *lot* more to it than that…

Do tell……

cpb
except for speed. its the usual speed vs control thing;
for standard modeling, texturing, key-framing and rendering speed wins, if that's what you're selling.-cpb

For keyframing and general animation I do find Houdini faster. For rendering it depends on the renderer but I do agree XSI's workflow is much faster for lighting/shading part. For modeling and texturing, speed wise, XSI is much faster.
However, when it comes to huge projects (like a feature) I think Houdini is better because of its flexibility.

Dragos

If
http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/CompaniesUsingHoudini#New_Zealand [odforce.net] is out of date then update it, its a wiki and wikis are supposed to be edited by the public.

Another way of approaching the animation layers would be to change the way takes work and add a blending mode to the current overwrite behaviour. The benefit would be takes become a bit more powerful, the down side would be they would be used differently and need to be re thunk. if you had a animation using layers a+b+c and using render take “reflection pass” that wouldn't just work as is