Ok, random thought of the day, but I would love to hear how other people think about this.

I was wondering why not SideFX explore adding other small apps to its rooster.
I am thinking particularly of soft that depends on real-time performance over procedural structure. Such as Substance Painter or Zbrush?
The development of Houdini seems to remain top of the line, would the company venture outside that to maybe poke at other fields?

I just see how much animation, rigging and layout have radically improved over the years and now with the focus on texturing and GPU performance enhancement....well I was wondering if there is something else coming.

Substance painter and functionality of zbrush will come into houdini just a matter of time. Realtime stuff is done with Touchdesigner that has houdini code in it.

The core of houdini is the best thing what SESI has every development outside produces complexity (development, sales, support...) with not much benefits.
When SESI expand copernicus to Compositing & NLE ala Nuke or DaVinci. They still sale Houdini just for a bigger customer base.

The foundry or Maxon has multiple Software with multiple code bases that creates complexity that need more Development ressource but for the User no benefits.

Pretty good points @mandrake0 I would have thought that bringing that functionality within Houdini would make the software more complex. But I definitely see the expansion of Copernicus in particular to compositing.
Houdini has a very robust modeling toolkit also what it really lacked was a comfortable UI to not leave the viewport and a good geo representation Vulkan and the new ui basically put them half there.

I really hope there is an EEVEE equivalent in Houdini. I know why there isn't: because SideFX and Epic have a partnership and EEVEE will threaten Unreal in filemaking. One can dream, though.

kodoragon
I really hope there is an EEVEE equivalent in Houdini. I know why there isn't: because SideFX and Epic have a partnership and EEVEE will threaten Unreal in filemaking. One can dream, though.

If I remember correctly it have been mentioned on a earlier Houdini release presentation that a realtime renderer is being worked on. I think it was around the same time we got Vulkan viewport.

I didn’t mean realtime renders. But apps that put Realtime performance over procedural workflow as imperative. Soft like substance painter or zbrush excel as they focus on realtime feedback while working on destructive workflows. While Houdini puts premium on making sure all tools are procedural and talking to each other. A few years back I would discard the idea of SideFx even exploring this as the market is pretty much dominated by those two and Blender comes as a good second option. But with cops, Vulkan and the already powerful tools within Houdini. At least substance painter seems very achievable almost as a by product of the improvements they made.