Hi all,
LightWave generalist here (background in dynamics).
Looking at Houdini (for work and personally), and have a couple technical questions…

Technical Question 1:
I'd like to use body morphs to set up simple curved body animation.
Can Houdini allow me to block out simple body animation with morphs (which is easy, but animates terribly), but control the vertice deformations individually via “curvy keyframe type splines”, not linear morphs? I'm thinking this would be a cheap way to get basic body animation for long format animation. Can't do this in LightWave without a plugin.

Technical Question 2:
Does Houdini allow the user to set up custom inter particle forces (then Houdini take care of the motion integration, collisions, etc.), and or can I completely control particles with my own code? Can't do this in LightWave. BTW, Houdini out of the box dynamics looks impressive, but I'd like to be able to control stuff manually too. The dynamics price jump is considerable as well.



Any shed light on these things is much appreciated.

Thanks. -Mike