Hey all. I thought I´d post a few things about my experiences. A year ago I was hired by a company to make the transition from SI to Maya. However that was not that easy. First SI is just the better program in all fields than Maya. Second SI user don´t like Maya to put it mildly, just the the thought of transitioning to Maya makes them shiver.
I´m a Maya user but I always used Modo to get the grunt work done, modeling and lookdev, then going over to Maya mostly for Arnold or Vray. So Modo gets in to the pipeline and it works great for certain things. Used together with Mari, Nuke and Zbrush it´s really effective. You can get a lot of basic to mid complicated work done. The great benefit is that you can get your Nuke compers to learn Modo in a very short time.
When it comes to “real” 3D it falls short. I´m talking about advanced particle effects, rigging and character animation. At the moment those tools aren´t enough. It´s not that easy to compete with SI in rigging and animation, they had decades of improvements and all kinds of specialized tools. There are nice features in the Modo animation system that is very good indeed. But setting up a complex rig with facial controls etc. is probably not doable.
Next thing I did was to dig in to Houdini. I´m an art kind of guy that always shied away from TD stuff in Maya. But a year later I´m slowly turning into a TD. With Houdini it´s so much fun and actually easy compared to Maya.
The rigging system in Houdini is the best I´ve seen anywhere. I´ve never gotten so good results so fast anywhere else. I have not gotten deep into the animation but if you set up the rig with the proxy rig like you are supposed to the feedback is good. The viewport is a bit clunky, a little tricky to select handles.
To sum it up a bit.
Modo pros:
Amazing modeling (including mesh fusion)
Great previz tools, rendering, painting, shading, .
Nice GUI
Easy to learn and get great results
Modo cons:
Hard to make really advanced 3D
The alembic exporter
Animation tools promising but not there.
Houdini pros:
Amazing TD tools
Great rigging
Amazing rendering and shading with Mantra
Fluids, pyro and destruction.
Houdini cons:
Classic modeling not possible.
No texture painting and sculpting.
Animation tools promising but not there.
Conclusion:
Houdini and Modo complement each other really good but animation is still missing. So sidefx and the foundry, just create an animation system that is up to SoftImage standard and we are good to go (and get around Maya completely).