Hi!

I just updated to 16 and now am experimenting around with the new Terrain tools. My problem is that I want to create a heightfield that is based on a nurbs shape and not square. However so far I have found no way to turn my triangulated nurbs into a terrain. Is there any way to solve my problem other than creating a normal heightfield and then cutting it to shape afterwards using booleans or something?

Something like an inverted Convert HeightField node would be ideal.

This looks way better than what I have seen the last time I checked out GPU rendering. Thank you for sharing. Impressive how fast this has developed in the last few years. Kind of wondering now how much time this took to render and how much they were edited after rendering.

Thanks for all the input. I will try Houdini as soon as the download is complete.

In the meantime I am watching videos of snakes on youtube. Now I really want to figure out how I can create spline like ik chains…

Never considered using a gpu renderer for previz. Not sure how easy it is to use the same materials for different render engines.(unless I use an engine that supports both cpu and gpu) Will definetly give it a shot when I have nothing else to do/learn.

Wow, that was a fast response. And I never thought that a staff member would take the time to drop by.

No, you are definitely not discouraging. I already realized a few years ago after I finally managed to render my first scene in Cinema 4d (without Vray) that getting into the vfx community was and probably will be a long term project. Right now I just want to settle down on one software and get really good at it. I am not looking for a do it all software but something that has solid implementations of the basic features, is not going to die in the next few years, a lot of additional features to study once I have the basics down and a decent learning curve.

A consistent UI and background logic sound very promising. Is there any specific quickstart guide you would recommend to someone coming from maya? And is there a recommended order to learn the other features?

And could you maybe drop some server/cnames to a few beginner friendly irc channels? Having a bit of friendly competition could probably help me a lot.


Thank you for taking this much time to help me, I really really appreciate it.

Jacky

PS: Octane/Redshift? Aren't those GPU based renderers? I am kind of surprised that you mention them, the last time I informed myself about them I read that their only advantage lays in allowing the user to keep working on stuff while they run in the background. As far as I am aware they don't really pay of in terms of speed/hardware price.
(I am currently using a hexacore 3.2ghz intel, 32gigs ram, and nvidia 980 ti 2gig pc due to my non cgi related IT classes. Should I consider going more into the gpu direction if ever have the budget to update my workstation? Its not like I can't run my scripts on the gpu…)

I so hope this is the right subforum…


Hi there!

(Feel free to skip to the third paragraph)
A little bit about me any my background: I am a young IT student located in vienna and aspiring 3d/vfx artist in my free time. Over the last couple of years I did spend quite some time getting a feeling for different vfx related programs and experimenting around with them. I started out with Cinema 4d and Adobe AE (easier to learn than Nuke) but then changed to 3ds Max due to the highly limited features of c4d and the fact that I never really got realistic renderings. 3ds Max produced way better results after only a few hours and for the first few months or so I was happy with it. Recently I gave Maya a shot and so far I think that it feels far more intuitive than 3ds Max.

However, now that I have grasped the basics of quite a few different solutions I think the time has come to finally settle on one and start to learn the more difficult (and interesting) parts.
I know, that c4d is not what I want to go forward with. It was really great to get a basic understanding of camera controls and modelling but I don't think that I can really get the results I am looking for with it. This leaves me with 3ds max and Maya and while I can understand, why some people would prefer 3ds max, I am probably going with Maya. However, even Maya is not without flaws. It has totally freaked out one or two times while I was working with it, some features are really not intuitive and you need plugins for pretty much anything more than the basics. Don't get me wrong, plugins are great, but when you have to spend a fortune on plugins to replace or upgrade features that should already be included it starts to get annoying. Even more so when some of these plugins come with entirely new interfaces and their own little programs.

And this is where Houdini comes in. From my current understanding Houdini has a better fluid/particle integration and support for procedural content while it's biggest weakness is modelling and animation. I have heard quite a few people mention Houdini on forums but it is kind of hard to find anything concrete or a direct comparison. It kind of feels like listening to the Linux vs Mac debate while being a Windows user. Sort of.

The areas I am especially interested in are:

Basic modelling, scene setup and animation: as already mentioned above according to my research this is one of Houdinis biggest weaknesses. I have no idea if there have been big changes over the last years or if there are updates planned but as long as I can import objs and setup my scene this should be fine. I neither have the time nor the resources to create anything more than some rough background objects. Should I ever want to get started in modelling I would probably have to learn ZBrush or Mudbox anyways.

Large scale outdoor scenes/landscapes (Forest and natural looking rocks). I think that I should be able to get quite interesting results in Houdini when it comes to this. Haven't really researched it but I recently read about someone using packed geometry and instancing in Houdini to massively cut down render times for a huge forest scene. Would be highly interesting for me considering that I don't really have to resources to build or rent a farm for every scene I want to make. Plan B would be to mess around with World Machine and Terragen. But that would mean that I have to spent time learning them too.

Water: Ok, water has been haunting me since my first Cinema 4d experiments. Using a plane with some displacement and reflection worked in some settings for me but foam or cliffs were a nightmare. And using Particles to create an entire ocean like some of the big studios is pure madness. Trust me, I tried.(I was bored and wanted to test my new pc) Is there any good way to combine geometry, shaders and some particles in Houdini to get nice waves that interact with the environment?
I always try to create tropic islands sooner or later, don't ask my why. Without matte painting and too much other compositing trickery. Kind of a weird tick I have.

Muscle and Bone systems. So far I never played around with anything more than the most basic rigging of characters. This would probably require me to get started in an organic modelling software, but it would be nice to have the tools
should I ever want to give it a shot.

Rendering and server farms: Ok, so I am expecting render times similar to what I currently getting with Maya. The real question is what engines come with Houdini and which ones of them are interesting for an indie artist with limited resources and time. And how easy and cost efficient is it to push my entire project to a rendering farm should I ever want to render something really big?


The question is if Houdini is the right software to get started with considering my interests. Are a few hours (10-15h) a week enough time to properly learn it? I did some procedural content in java and C over the years and know how complicated it can be to get things right. And how long does it take to learn the basics? You should also note that I need something that can be used by a single person. The only other person I know that is interested in filming uses Windows Movie Maker and makes political art films.

Would be great if some other beginners or indie artists could tell me a bit about their experiences and maybe try to help me understand the differences to the software I have worked with before. How long did you need to get used to the node based workflow? And maybe someone could point me to some really good (free) tutorials/documentation/examples to get started with? I would greatly appreciate any help.


Jacky