Hi, I been an die hard fan of XSI for years now right up until 6. Which is giving me high blood pressure and hyper tension. So I am looking to make a switch, I can't go back to Maya and i don't like 3ds. I was wondering if any one else here has gone from one to the other and how it went.

I am an animator so my two biggest questions are about the rigging and key frame animation tools and how they compare to XSI.

thanks

Download it and give it a try thats the only way to find out.

R :shock:

We use both Houdini (mainly) and XSI here. I'm not the XSI man but I do use it once in a while.
IMO (subjective), Houdini compares very favorably with XSI when it comes to rigging. I think it's actually better: you have muscles, you have the SOP networks which allow you to do various crazy stuff to your skins, you have CHOPs which offer amazing possibilities for constraints and relationships, and there's also a very complete and extensive expression language.
You also have VEX (VOPs) which allows you to build custom deformers quite easily.
Houdini also has attribute transfer (gator), and had it years before XSI, despite Softimage's claim as being innovators with this.
When it comes to animation: the Curve Editor is very powerful in Houdini. You also have the interesting (and useful) ability to have different functions on different segments of the curve (so between key 1 and 2 you have a bezier interpolation while from key 3 to 4 you can put an expression for example).
One thing where XSI is better is the DopeSheet. In Houdini you have the irritating limitation of being able to only have one selection, so you can't select different blocks at the same time. Also Houdini doesn't have ripple editing of keyframes.
For Mixer functionality there's CHOPs. Much more powerful but the workflow in XSI is much faster.
In Houdini you also have Takes, which allows you to have different animation versions in the same file.
There are no “animation layers” at the moment, although you can do something similar with CHOPs, I suppose.
There's also an immensely powerful fur system, but again for simple things the workflow is much faster in XSI. But the results with Houdni, if you take your time, are better and the system is very customizable with CVEX.

Hope that helps,

Dragos

Well, despite what Dragos said (little biased Dragos? ), the switch could be shocking for you. The character workflow in XSI is very impressive. Well done, complete, workable, perhaps the best character pipeline out-of-the-box.

All of XSI's shots and kind of animation effects can be done in Houdini but most probably with a little or much more efforts on setup. There are also kind of stuff which can't be done in XSI and are very straightforward in Houdini (like mixing of shape morhing, keyframe animation, and physic simulations). But these are minor issues.

One thing to keep in mind is that Houdini was designed to be flexible and scalable - and this has its price. There are very few one-push-button tools made for your convenience. But once setup is done, you can do anything with it, and it will hardly ever constrain you, since you can change it in any time you want. without braking your character.

SYmek
Well, despite what Dragos said (little biased Dragos? ), the switch could be shocking for you. The character workflow in XSI is very impressive. Well done, complete, workable, perhaps the best character pipeline out-of-the-box.

Not at all biased. Re-read my post. I actually said quite the same: the workflow is fast, but the software IS limited, no matter how you try to put it. You can do a lot of *limited* stuff very fast, that's true.
The switch could be shocking, that is true, because the approaches are very different.

Dragos

digitallysane
There's also an immensely powerful fur system, but again for simple things the workflow is much faster in XSI.

Keep your eyes peeled for a new, radically simplified (but equally powerful) fur workflow coming to the Houdini 9.5 beta in a day or two.

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Hay thanks for all the comments! I installed it last night. I am really diggin the curve editor its the slickest one i have seen to date, that was the main thing for me. I like the UI too, quite friendly looking. Im gonna dig deeper this weekend in to the rigging an scripting.

8)

As a long time teacher of Houdini I've found XSI people have a much easier time picking up Houdini than maya or 3dsmax people.

Ask lots of questions, the people on these forums and the Odforce.net forums are very friendly.

Have you found the scale handle in the channel editor yet? Don't miss the Block editing feature in the Flipbook. I still regard it as a brilliant piece of magic.