In January my small studio will be purchasing an 3d package to upgrade our services. We already use XSI and one of the candidates for the purchase is XSI Essentials. But, ever since i watched those inspiring tutorials from 3D Buzz few years back I kept my eye on Houdini.

What I'm wondering is: Is Houdini Escape usable in all areas of production? For example, is there any dynamics in Escape or is it reserved for Master? Can I do any hair in Escape? I see wire solver isn't part of the Escape, is there a usable workaround?

Is Escape comparable to XSI Essentials (now with repackaging, it has both hair and SYFLEX cloth) feature wise?

For particles, I know Escape has the Particle SOP, and Master has the POPs. I guess I could live with Particle SOP, XSI particles may be subpar when its combined with other OPs.

What else I might be missing in Escape?

My company does mainly TV commercials and similar, but focus in 2008 might shift to Film VFX/Game Cinematics.

I'm also partner in a small studio and we use XSI Essentials and Escape. Which one you'll prefer depends on many factors, here we intend to make Houdini our main package. I'm not the XSI guy in our studio so although I know the package I'm not a power user so I won't refer specifically to its features.

You can generate fur in Escape, but you cannot do dynamic simulations of hair. The fur toolset is *very* powerful in Houdini but at this moment lacks a high level UI for shaping the fur, so you work with attributes and maps. So you'd have problems if you'd need realistic motion of simulated hair, because the Dynamics module (DOPs) is only available in Houdini Master. This means also that Cloth simulation, which is part of DOPs, is not available in Escape.

Particle SOP is OK, you can do lot of stuff if you combine it with other SOPs.

To answer your question, in my view Escape is more than comparable with with XSI Essential, but it depends heavily on the kind of jobs you have. If half of them require Cloth, then maybe Essentials would be better for you. Generally speaking I find Houdini more solid and rounded as a package, even if you simply count features or modules Essentials might seem better.

I feel Escape is a better solution because of the workflow (very flexible, this is very important for us small studios), I can do very fast revisions. This, combined with the Digital Assets makes it a killer solution for commercials.
The character tools in Escape are very good. Mantra is a very powerful renderer, and Escape has built in support for Renderman (or compatible like Air or 3Delight), a RenderMan shader builder and also a very customizable rendering interface (soho) which makes it possible to connect Houdini to almost any renderer. You also have a nice full floating point compositing system which is tuned for rendering post processing (very good integration with mantra shaders and attributes).
Depending on your expansion intentions, it's interesting to note that Escape can open assets or projects made with Master. So if in the future you need Dynamics, you can buy one Master license and let's say five Escapes and the Escape seats will be able to use Assets with dynamics made with master. You can make a Hair simulation with Master and use it (and also change it's parameters) on any Escape seat.
Also, Master licenses can be rented. So if we got hit tomorrow by a fluids job, we can rent Master and do it (and if we do it well, then we'll probably be able to buy Master afterwards )

Dragos

Hi el_diablo,
Depends what exactly you wnat to do. Project wise I think Escape is a complete tool. You will probably miss Master in case of some complex particles or dynamics stuff. But for most of the projects particle and spring sop can do their job. You can also mimic some dynamics effects on a sop level + maybe some chops, expressions and VEX. Everything depends how deep you want to go into dynamics. The good thing is that you can bring ready-made tools built in Master into Escape (see fxtools), You can't edit them in Escape though.
When it comes to hair, there is a comprehensive example how framestore dealt with it. I might be wrong but I think for speed issues, full system was build in sop + some expression.

One problem which could be annoying at the beginning is exchanging data between houdini and xsi (might be tricky if you want to do it back and fourth) The best thing would be to write your own stuff to have stable and predictable pipeline, but I remember there are a few threads about that on odforce.

don't give up and good luck
hope that helped a little
cheers
kuba


PS. One of the best features of Escape is that it comes with unlimited mantra licenses.

I really want to reinforce digitallysane's point about digital assets: you only need to have one copy of Master to generate custom assets that include dynamics and particles. Escape can use all these assets transparently. This tends to work out really well in practice, since usually there's just one or two TDs creating assets for several artists, so you only need one or two copies of Master to go with your several copies of Escape.

Also, the new, easy to download FX Tools [sidefx.com] shelf works in Escape too, so if the prebuilt tools we ship are to your liking, you don't need Master at all.

Joe
Also, the new, easy to download FX Tools [sidefx.com] shelf works in Escape too, so if the prebuilt tools we ship are to your liking, you don't need Master at all.

Joe is being a bit optimistic here. The FX tools offer a good taster set of visual effects tools but generally speaking you would need Houdini Master for most effects work.

The chart on the pricing page [sidefx.com]gives you a breakdown of features in the two packages. As you can see Escape is great for everything from modeling, to animation, to character work and lighting and rendering. Effects and Dynamics are the domain of Houdini Master. Working together you can do your TD work in Master and then animate in Escape but until our FX toolset grows considerably then Houdini Master is necessary for effects.

We recently repriced Master to make it more affordable to shops that want access to these higher end tools. I think that you would find that the time you would take to work around Escape's limitations would soon set you back more than the cost of one Houdini Master license to anchor your pipeline.

Robert

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I will be most certanly buying Houdini in the near future, it just might not be this time around. XSI 7 is getting ready, and it will prolly be out early next year. There is a lot to be said about app fluency and the impact on project progress, and I might not be able to get up to speed on Houdini in time for some planned projects.