Hello
I am considering switching to Houdini, but I cannot try it at the moment since I am on a PPC Mac.
I have seen some talk on these forums about Houdini not displaying subdivision surfaces on the viewport, but only on the render. How do s.surfaces work in Houdini?

What they mean is the viewport doesn't subdivide geometry on the fly but you can display them by adding a subdivide node. There's a tutorial movie under the Learning tab above, watch that and it should become clear.

Does Houdini use the Catmull-clark for it's Subdivision surfaces?

thanks,

Yes.

if you used the subdivideSOP be aware that the sop is an iteration to the limit surface, not the limit surface. The step of 1, 2, 3, do not necessarily match what you find in other applications.

when you render as a subdivision surface the result is the limit surface.
-k

One nice trick from Houdini on the Spot [books.elsevier.com] (which is a highly recommended book btw) is that you can get the same results as in Maya subdivision by cascading Subdivide SOPs. So for level 3 subdivision, put 3 Subdivision SOPs one after another, instead of one with iterations set to 3.

Dragos