Nate, use Rhino and export IGES from it.
Import to huudini.
You are done

Cheers Peter

If you work with acad and plan to export data for further modeling it's convenient to draw very precisely, not to have lines you don't know about or or useless rubbish and use closed polylines. It makes life easier in later production.
You import it anywhere and work directly on acad curves.

Well, it's a pity we can't test renderman with apprentice.
Unfortunately I don't know about renderdrive and houdini, I saw renderdrive on a feir 3 years ago, it was impressive but limited, and the look was cg so I wasn't interested in it.

About AIR yet…is it possible to run distributed rendering using only 1 license of Houdini master and many Air licenses?

Peter

I wrote three times that it's not open GL thing
And yes, flexibility most important but character animation is little spontaneous work and there should not be any workflow drawbacks like performance issues, just my 5 c's

Peter

Do you have some experience with AIR and houdini?
It seems to be a very fast renderer, how does it compare to mantra?
Mantra's GI and ambient occlusion are not too rapid.
Also is there the ability to create vex shaders for AIR since it's possible for PRman, or do one have to create shaders in AIR GUI (vshade or something) and put them into library?
It is not expensive in compare to PRman and seems to be “production proven”.
I have a bit of experience in AIR and rhino and it have a nice and fast GI and overall performance is very promising.

Peter

As I said, high poly scene works fine in apprentice on both radeon and geforce, XSI works very well on both also.
If I change a graphics card soon I'll post how it works.
But could you tell me if moving rabbit's pelvis is instantenous on your quadro?
Just curious.

Thanks

Peter

I am learning now and I began with video tuts, no matter what version they are for, it still is very similar.
I think these tutorials can make you grasp the structure of the software, how it works, and thus put you on the slide.
After you do some tutorials you can start moving your projects to houdini and try to make them or replicate.
It is not very easy but I can risk saying that it is easier and much more clear that the whole maya crap which is a big mess.

Apart from that, houdini is just exciting because everything here is different and it's a pleasure to discover the extreme power in this oddity, you never know what hides behind a corner. For me it's a great drive!

So really make the tutorials (begin with the staircase because it's most fun), make them once again without watching… make some more (techimage had nice), and try to work.


cheers

Peter

Hello and thanks for a reply.
I don't consider it an open GL problem though, I tested it also on my old good Ti 4600 and the rigs slows down while I can easily tumble a 200K polygons of some model.
Doesn't matter, I'm on my way to upgrading hardware and houdini is such a great environment that some rig lazyness is not a big issue.
I believe I could optimize them if I wouldn't be a beginner in this software.

Thanks

Peter Twardo

Hi,

The Beatrice rig works just fine, it is a very simple one though.
Thanks a lot for your rig Nate!
It is very nice, I'll study it in first free moment.
Posing the pelvis is not instantenous, perhaps it's just what houdini works, so I'd better stop asking.
The procedural power gives controlability with some performance cost, as I see it.

Thanks a lot guys, it's a great forum I've learned a lot from you already.

cheers

Peter

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Peter

At first thank you guys for an extensive and fast reply

I'm from XSI list at xsibase, and I'd like to learn houdini since I've always been amazed by this software. I downloaded apprentice when it first arrived but due to lack of time and good will I stopped my Hjourney.
Now since I work more and look for solving more things I decided to learn it hard.
In XSI we have very sophisticated and complicated rigs which updates instantly without any performance lost. Basically anything you can build in terms of rigging is very fast.
I tried many other applications and saw different rigs and no one was so slow. Thus I ask you since you have far better understanding of houdini.
I definitely should look up the node tree and fiddle around the rig structure.
But if you would be so kind and try to optimize the rabbit by locking nodes and then move the character null or pelvis or any control element and tell me if it works instantly or force you to wait by crawling after your cursor.

Thanks

Peter

I installed a fresh copy of 7.0 Apprentice, downloaded the rabbit otl and installed. I created the rabbit and noticed that the rig is responding very slowly. If i click pose and move the character null I have something like 2 fps, the same with hips, ears and on. Only the hands and legs are fast.
The same situation is with human skeleton.
My system is not slow, I tried the possible display options, but it doesn't seem to be an open gl issue since the million polygon scene is quite fast.
It looks like after moving some control object it takes some time to calculate all the connections.

In many other applications rigs respond instantly no matter how complex.
I don't think I spoiled something or make some error because I didn't touch anything.

Peter

Hi, I'm new to the list though my interest in houdini lasts for some time.
I was always amazed by its architecture and workflow, but I didn't think about houdini as a full featured software. I don't like to switch 3d applications in production (at animating/rendering level) so I look for a complete solution.
Now, since houdini became more character anim oriented I decided to test it's rigging capabilities.
I downloaded SESI rigs and after geting in touch, I found out that they work much slower than any rigs in any software I ever used.

Is it something normal caused by houdini architecture and the complexity of node structure or should I play with my system/workstation setup? (dual AMD 2400 + on radeon 9700)
I think about working on houdini but that was a rather discouraging experience.


Thanks

Peter