jordibares
These were my feelings when i started but then you realise that you should switch how you think about Houdini and the workflow, instead if having “packed tools” you have “tool components”, more granular, more powerful and certainly liberating.
Surely enough proper CAD data support would be great, animation layers, a daylight system (with a nice interface) would be most welcomed, etc… but you will soon realise you don't really want an specialised tool to remove points given you have already the “Delete SOP” which allows you to do that and more.
I will try to point you to some existing tools so you can find your way, hope that helps.
- Adding functions for curve editing : Check the Delete SOP, Carve SOP, Point SOP and certainly Wrangle SOP.
- Having primitives with slicing, you have them but works only on certain types of geometry, for example, you can “dice” it if it is a poly mesh but not if it is a pure primitive. And really that is what you really want. Also, you should think in the various steps, Houdini tends to have a step by step process rather than one tool that tries to do too much.
- CAD data can be imported via ives but and it is quite good but it is not as modern as the current CAD data formats like STEP, unfortunately that is not being addressed yet.
The presets for Lsystems may be a good idea at first but surely enough you will probably want to do grass with fur instead or curves, or instances, or…
The PBR materials is 100% necessary and something i have been banging about recently so I would love to see the next release on that respect.
Again, good ideas you are throwing our there and I am sure they are reading it but I think it would be great to also dive a bit more on some of these things that are already there in a less obvious but more powerful form.
hope it helps
jb
Hello Jordi,
And thank you for your input. Allow me to disagree with you though. I don't know what is exactly your role into 3d(animator/generalist/modeler etc) or if you have your own studio or if you are your own employer. Well, i am saying this because you have apparently missed the point in here. It's not about having ‘packed tools’ it's about having all the features needed to do your job. More precisely, i am sure i can go ahead and build myself a rectangle using VEX, but i am sure not going even thinking of doing it while i am starting a project. I am a self employed freelancer, and my time is more precious then diamonds. I will choose and purchase whatever gives me that rectangle out of the box, so i can do 2 projects while you are building your VEX rectangle. As a generalist(i am doing everything from modeling to MOCAP and character and general animation myself) i know one thing for sure. 80%(or even more) of my modeling and scene building is revolving around the so called ‘primitive modeling’. What primitive modeling is, is that you break your model to be into primitive shapes, and start to construct it( so reverse of the ‘breaking’). Now, in Houdini i find out that there is an almost huge miss on this aspect, and while i can use something like Blender(witch by the way has an amazing array of primitives, basic and extended ones like gems, tubes, screws etc) the NURBES/curves domain is different. Is different because there is no app on the market that will export NURBS/curves primitives(rectangle, circle, cog wheel etc). Hence my request to have them included into Houdini, and why they are on my TOPMOST priority. Second of all, vast majority of my animations, are done manipulating some form of basic characteristics of the primitives(let's say we can animate a bevel amount over time). Having this already built in, it's a a huge time saver. I think SESI can learn few thinks from Cinema4D in this regard. I don't know why you focused on slice, it was just a sample, not the pinnacle of my requests. I hope now it's more clear why and how was my list constructed. There are far more requests i would like to place, like render instances, a proper timer on renders(and mplay too) not just the start time of the render, but a simple clock to tell me how long my render has taken, so i can optimize it etc…
Attached you will find few samples of my projects; one it's a grill and i model it using primitives and NURBS from pictures. It's ready to be animated with pivots properly placed on the doors and wheels. How long it will take to make this project inside Houdini? Or better yet, Houdini has all the tools needed to do it fast and efficient? Especially the frontal and sides parts witch are of an organic shape and will be a *** to box model it. I finished this project in 2 days, buy the way…..