Hello, i've got plenty of questions about Houdini, but my major ones revolve around if Houdini has the aspects i need. So with that said, the following questions involve houdini being usable to me.

1.) How well does it run on 32bit Ubuntu Hardy? Any problems with it? Anyone have a decent amount of experience with running it on Ubuntu?

2.) For character animation itself, does Houdini have all the basics? Is CA itself comparable to that of XSI, Maya, etc?

3.) In terms of Rigging, does it have good rigging support? I use advanced rigs, so i need much more than the standard IK/FK Bone support. I need a full set of constraints (rot, pos, scl, parent, etc) along with custom properties, linking, etc. Basically i need everything XSI and Maya can do in terms of Rigging.

4.) All of the above rigging stuff i mentioned, also needs to be accessible from a Python SDK because i make plugins to handle my rigging. If i choose to use Houdini, i will be porting a XSI Plugin i made for rigging (Fully free and Opensource for Houdini), but i need basic Dynamic GUI, and full rigging access via the python SDK. Is this possible?

If anyone has answers on these basics, please answer.

Thank you,
Lee

Briefly, considering your questions my first response is also a question.
Given your requirements why would you use anything else but Houdini

I've been teaching with houdini since it first came out. I have for a few years now used Ubuntu exclusively and have had no problems running Houdini. Having said that though you do have to make sure that Opengl is working well and that you use nothing but Nvidia graphics cards. The opengl issues are linux specific not specific to any 3d app.

I regard Houdini's character tools to be the current best of breed. Couple that with a procedural workflow and the ability to package your rigs as digital assets and you have a very powerful workflow.

Python is well integrated into Houdini, but not being a python programmer I'll have to let someone else respond to that question.

probbins
Briefly, considering your questions my first response is also a question.
Given your requirements why would you use anything else but Houdini

Simply because honestly, i know near nothing about Houdini. I own XSI, Modo, ZBrush, etc. And houdini has (and i think still is) a mysterious corner in the CG world to many. Given your trust of it though, and seeing as my running it seems to work alright (despite the cheap laptop ati card), i'll give it a shot and purchase the 50$ tutorial from DT.

Please others, do still reply. My rigging and SDK questions are especially important for my usage of Houdini.

Thanks!

*edit*
Actually i take that back. Seems i have a major GUI bug. I have zero icons hah.
Thoughts?

*edit2*
Phew, it was a config problem.
this [sidefx.com] fixed it.

welcome to Houdini Leefmc. I'm new here too and it's like a drug this procedural stuff…. Don't take the free hit if you do't want to get hooked.

Mike_RB
welcome to Houdini Leefmc. I'm new here too and it's like a drug this procedural stuff…. Don't take the free hit if you do't want to get hooked.

You the mike from the lux forums?

As far as getting hooked, i hope i do ;P. Im searching for my best Linux CG option, and Sidefx seems to support linux very well, which i am VERY happy with.

*edit*
Yea if they support Linux as well as i am hoping, they'll instantly get huge bonus points in my book. Basically, being the only competent 3d company to support multiple linux distros, and especially the later versions of Ubuntu.

Same Mike_RB on CG talk, LW, Lux, and now here.

EDIT: You're right, I'm Michael Blackbourn over at Lux… Forgot I'm my real name over there.

Well so far Houdini is going well, but i am a bit worried about the speed of houdini on my system.

Its odd, im guessing its my system (simple laptop), but Houdini seems to spike the cpu hard whenever simple transformations are being preformed on the standard houdini character's rig. Any thoughts to this?

The display seems to preform fine, i can rotate the character with no troubles, nothing seems to even care. I can even put the display into wireframe, and still when i transform the character rig the computer spikes. Two threads near 100% for a simple hip rotation.

I realize this laptop stinks, but i never had to go to my mac pro just to animate in XSI or whatnot. Heck, i had 10x the polys on a character in XSI and i used my heavy rigs (heavy being, complicated, lots of features) and it still outpreformed this heh.

Im assuming something is wrong, because i can't imagine a software that handles particles and whatnot so well can be bogged down by such a simple rig.

Any thoughts on this? Is it a bug?

*edit*
It may just be time for me to get a new comp hah .
Once things settle down in a month or two i can buy a new mac pro and use my current one as my main comp then. (Its my method of purchase. Buy big and new for my server, and then use the old server as my main machine)

I had a problem with spikes, too. It went away when I switched to local licensing, which is available with the 9.5 beta.

So that we have a benchmark, can you load up the Toon Character from the Auto Rigs shelf and animate that. Let us know what your performance is then.

probbins
So that we have a benchmark, can you load up the Toon Character from the Auto Rigs shelf and animate that. Let us know what your performance is then.

Actually that is what i was using.

Its gatta be just my computer or something.. because i experienced a similar reaction when i was following the DT Intro course and i loaded their first mousetrap scene. I could rotate the scene viewport just fine, it acted as smooth as butter, but as soon as i selected a piece of geometry it lagged for a good 3-5seconds. Basically the same thing with the toon character, except maybe .25s lag when selecting rig controls.

3.0ghz P4 HT, Radeon x600 Mobile (IIRC), 2 Gig Ram, etc.
Not a great laptop i know, 2 years old, but for 2 years it was my animation laptop for XSI with no troubles (and i made heavy rigs heh).

Leefmc: this might be a good place to hang out as well:

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?s=821b70bb79bc3d742cbdf84d3bf8ef3f&showforum=18 [forums.odforce.net]

Mike_RB
Leefmc: this might be a good place to hang out as well:

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?s=821b70bb79bc3d742cbdf84d3bf8ef3f&showforum=18 [forums.odforce.net]

Yea i saw them, but wasn't sure. Spose i'll give it a shot. Overall these forums seem populated, but rather lacking on the categories. Its nice to have content separation heh

Leefmc
1.) How well does it run on 32bit Ubuntu Hardy? Any problems with it? Anyone have a decent amount of experience with running it on Ubuntu?

It runs very well on Ubuntu 7.10, the same goes for Ubuntu 7.04. Actually Ubuntu and SUSE seem to be the favorite distros among Houdini users.
We run it on Ubuntu 7.10 64 bit here and it works great.

Leefmc
2.) For character animation itself, does Houdini have all the basics? Is CA itself comparable to that of XSI, Maya, etc?

Yes, it has everything. I consider Houdini a very powerful CA package, which unfortunately suffers from its perception in the industry as a FX package, so the CA Houdini community is small. Depending on what software you're used to, it might be a little bit difficult at first because of the different workflow.

Leefmc
3.) In terms of Rigging, does it have good rigging support? I use advanced rigs, so i need much more than the standard IK/FK Bone support. I need a full set of constraints (rot, pos, scl, parent, etc) along with custom properties, linking, etc. Basically i need everything XSI and Maya can do in terms of Rigging.

It does have excellent rigging support. First you do have a nice set of constraints at the Object level (Blend Object, Sticky, Rivet, Sticky Blend etc). Then you have a huge amount of operators at the geometry (SOP level). Then you have a very complete and powerful expression language (and python). Then you have CHOPs (channel operators) which let you construct constraints and relationships in a visual way. And also VOPs which lets you build custom operators.
Also you can encapsulate everything in Digital Assets, with an UI defined by you, which can be shared and reused (like the Toon character for example).

Leefmc
4.) All of the above rigging stuff i mentioned, also needs to be accessible from a Python SDK because i make plugins to handle my rigging. If i choose to use Houdini, i will be porting a XSI Plugin i made for rigging (Fully free and Opensource for Houdini), but i need basic Dynamic GUI, and full rigging access via the python SDK. Is this possible?

I'll let other answer that as my experience is limited in this area.

Dragos

Very well wrote reply, thanks

Note that i am digging into the python sdk now, and i think i got the GUI side of things taken care of, but i am still curious as to how “full” the HOU SDK is. (By full, i mean basically anything you can manually do in houdini, a python script can aswell.)