Hello there everyone. I'm new to this forum. I am a senior character animator currently using Xsi as a tool. I may be working on a feature using Houdini as the tool of choice for character animation, so I am interested in finding out what kind of animation tool it can serve as.

To tell you the truth I am a little ignorant and therefore sceptical of Houdini's potential and performance in a professional feature film pipeline, so please forgive the amateur questions.

1: Can we compare Houdini to Xsi or Maya's powerful ik/fk switch?

2: Can we compare Houdini to manipulate a character with extremeley sophisticated scripting with any of the industry leading packages for character animation (XSI,Maya,Max)?

3: Which feature films with manual (no mocap) and character intensive have been done with Houdini?

4: How quick is the workflow in setting up a character (rigging and anim speed) hiding/unhiding, layers, selection sets, etc, compared with xsi or Maya?

5: How many years has Houdini been developping their animation tools?

6: Are there f-curves and can we manipulate the f-curves like Maya or Xsi ? Or is it like character studios TCB'S?

Thank you to whoever for answering my questions. It means alot!

http://www.sidefx.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1107 [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/company/history/index.html [sidefx.com]

1: Can we compare Houdini to Xsi or Maya's powerful ik/fk switch?

Houdini 6 has this feature implented and it is very flexible allowing the character animator all the controls he/she needs to blend or switch from ik to fk and back again.

It even has a new interface to allow characters to pass/toss objects and grab on to other characters very easily. I have yet to see a character properly interface with it's surroundings: picking up stuff, grabbing other characters. This tool is not too bad here.

2: Can we compare Houdini to manipulate a character with extremeley sophisticated scripting with any of the industry leading packages for character animation (XSI,Maya,Max)?

Houdini has a powerful scripting interface with all the right kind of hooks. Pick scripts to run commands to fetch channels, turn things on and off and much more. Many other scripting hooks. Houdini also has a whole host of specialized viewport handles available to manipulate bones and other objects in the character heirarchy.

I can site a few examples where characters animated in other packages were ported to houdini to do the more difficult character SFX shots like peeling disintegrating characters under tight animation control.

3: Which feature films with manual (no mocap) and character intensive have been done with Houdini?

Look at C.O.R.E. for a start.
Numerous Features done at C.O.R.E.: Nothing being the most recent. Remember C.O.R.E. did some of the creatures in The Nutty Professor. Their earlier work was fantastic. The work on Fly Away Home which was nominated for an Academy award for SFX failed simply because the Academy failed to realise that the birds were CG and C.O.R.E. at the time were not in a position to properly “sell” themselves.

There are other examples. Check out our web site.

4: How quick is the workflow in setting up a character (rigging and anim speed) hiding/unhiding, layers, selection sets, etc, compared with xsi or Maya?

The tools are fairly new so this is still an unknown. Given that, the tools are all centered around the 3D viewport and are very quick to lay down and are very flexible and tweakable. As an example, the capture edit tools contain painting options, point picking options with a spreadsheet interface if you wish, sliders on the bone handles themselves and more.

Rigging a character the first time for a feature by an entirely new crew will take some time to work out the workflow no matter what the software. Houdini now has the tools. It is up to the character rigger's experience to build a proper rig that the animators can work with. How many ways are there to rig a character? How is the spine rigged? The leg-foot-toe setup. How about the shoulders and on and on. Combine that with proper constraints, muscles and skin and you have a very sophisticated rig. Once again, it is the character rigger that determines this, not so much the tool anymore.

5: How many years has Houdini been developping their animation tools?

Since 1989 in Prisms carried over to Houdini to the present. Houdini 5 and Houdini 6 have seen the greatest leaps in productivity with regards to character.

6: Are there f-curves and can we manipulate the f-curves like Maya or Xsi ? Or is it like character studios TCB'S?

Houdini has a similar animation environment to Maya and Xsi. You use three tools to manipulate animation: channel editor, dope sheet a la SoftImage, spreadsheet a la Disney. Houdini does use some unique terminology as in the “Scope” which simply means a current collection of channels driven by selecting objects, selecting individual or groups of channels, adding or taking away from this “scope” of channels.

You add keys, you adjust keys, you slide keys, etc. Nothing to worry about here.

There are many powerful technologies in Houdini6 that make large scale production very efficient. Most animators don't care about this but there is something there for the facility managing the production.

I can see why you are so concerned. If you commit to deliver so many frames of animation a week, you want to be confident that the tool will give you that comfort zone. As well, Side Effects is a small company compared to Alias|Wavefront or SoftImage and are known as the SFX software of choice for Feature Film effects ignoring ILM (who are hard to ignore) and certainly not charcter. Maya had to start somewhere and it was Disney with Dinosaur and they used mainly Soft for the animation due to the same issues that you raise today. The animators stuck to SoftImage. Now look at where maya is and how far Soft has fallen back and does this have anything to do with the tools themselves… The most interesting thing was that the original Dinosaur was rigged with muscles and skin ready to go from the get go in Prisms in 1995 with hardly any custom code at all! Prisms is the predesessor to Houdini fyi.

I hope more production people pitch in to this conversation from the companies that do use Houdini to do some Feature Film character work otherwise the above is pretty hollow. How can you trust a guy from Side Effects? He must be biased. Yeah, I know.