What do you guys think of Houdini Escape using vex with pointclouds to emulate missing POP functionality? Is this feasible in a production scenario?

I have a option to buy Escape, but XSI might be a more complete for me…

Any opinions are welcome.

If you have more time than money, then possibly. If your time is money, then you'll probably eat it on the time portion, possibly to the point where you could've bought a Master license in the first place. And plus you then get DOPs.

Oh, and your workflow would suck and you'd end up hating Houdini ‘cause trying to do simulation with a system that’s not specifically designed to do simulation will often give you erroneous results. You'll tear your hair out with the awkward workflow, and scream and cuss wishing you had that simple thing called POPs.

And then your mother will call, wondering why you haven't called her in six months, and you'll realize that you've turned into :evil: all because of some stupid bug that only you have hit because you're trying to coerce VOPs into doing what it wasn't designed to do.

But don't worry, this is a biased opinion. ;-)