David Wigforss
Anyways, long story short, after watching just a little bit of the tutorials, I wasn't too keen to see expressions. I thought Houdini was connecting nodes together! Expressions are definately more efficient (and probably better once you know what you're doing), but harder to understand what's going on, and how changing parts of the equation result in different outputs. That's one of the things I liked best about ICE. It allowed me to learn things I never was able to grasp in the past (4x4 matrix). It feels like going back to Scripted Operators, which I generally tried to avoid.
Expressions are just a way to add some control to parameters and you could go pretty far without them, but they´re helpful. The more Houdini you learn the more you will use them without almost realizing it.
David Wigforss
In one of the other threads someone posted a scene with VEX. That looks like what I'm after! Another thing that I really liked about ICE was the color coding of different data types and knowing what plugs into what. Looks a bit more complicated in VEX.
You seem a bit confused with a few concepts. What you call VEX is actually VOPs (which means VEX Operators, this is, a graphical interface for the VEX shading language).
And of course, we have color coding for the different data types just like ICE (after all, ICE was based on VOPs). Dark green for scalars, bright green for vectors, blue for integers, orange for strings, etc….
I think you owe to yourself a closer look at the system.
