JColdrick:

No, quite the contrary, the thread won't be endless and won't be extended by me. And, I got precisely the answers I was looking for. Sorry if my intentions were not communicated clearly at the beginning. Thank you all for all of your input.

Greg Smith

Hey Greg,

I would have to say that there are more than just 3 major studios. There are alot of large studios. If you are considering ILM as one of your major 3 they were were checking out houdini for their visual effects at Siggraph during the Sidefx conference. They were doing an evaluation as to whether or not they would use SideFx in their production pipeline. As for Consulting work well thats what I do now while I go to school. I am TD of our little company and we are looking at incorperating Houdini Select into our production pipeline. It makes alot of sense and is more powerful than any of the other lower end Apps. Such as Lightwave for our purposes. It does address most of our needs at this time. Perhaps when we do TV commericals we might have to look at doing another package too. We use lots of packages and not just one and then we work them into a standard format system in which we can all work from. We bake all our shaders to make them compatable. If your doing freelancing I have to say rarely can you do a job quickly with just one package. You normally need more than one package and know all of the benefits and hold backs of the packages. Honestly we are looking at incorperating Maya, Lightwave, Max, and Houdini Select. Not to mention some other programs too like XFrog. Anyhow we work in Linux and Windows for various reasons. The only hold back really we have at the moment for Houdini Select is that we need Mental Ray Defs for shading in the Houdini Select and not just in Master. I suspect some other people would need RenderMan. I know that we could then work with maya for shading in mental ray because we would then have a compatable rendering solution between multiple packages. The problem we ran into with using Mantra is that we would need to write a full plugin suite for shading out to mantra as an in house tool. We figured the cost of development would be to high for our limited needs and have turned away from this idea. Mentral Ray seems like a good idea. I just wish that Mental Ray and RenderMan Shaders were at the Select Level so artist could work on just shading, lighting, and modeling for our projects. We don't need master even though we would love to have it. I recommend freelancing in a group structure because then you can more easily take on tasks and your clients feel more at ease when they know a group is working on their project.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

P.S. I had no idea where you were going with all of this so it now all makes since. I suspect Escape will be out soon so that will be very helpful to you. Houdini is well worth it from a Freelance position but it really matters on what kind of freelancing you are doing and what kind of projects you will be taking on.

Hey J.C.,

If a studio tried to make their hardware run 20+ years suspect it would catch fire trying to push it to do 3D CG. For all intent and purposes thats as long as anyone should ever need. I would not expect anyone to go longer than 10 and that would be really pushing it because I have no idea how they would be able to stay competative with an ever changing and more demanding time frames.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler