With the announcement of XSI's impending death I was looking at transferring some of the stuff I was doing in ICE to Houdini. The logic behind that was obviously that hopefully the nodal setup to nodal setup wouldn't be too different (this blog-post gave me hope : http://frenchdog.wordpress.com/category/dev/houdini/). [frenchdog.wordpress.com]
I'm not a TD, I can't code and I have immense respect for the people that can. ICE offers me a method of extending my capabilities without knowing scripting. I had a brief look at the L-system first steps (https://vimeo.com/51771303) [vimeo.com] video and I'm a little disheartened. Whereas ICE is fully nodal, Houdini seems to rely on a mix of scripting and nodes. The L-system node is really powerful but relies on a sort of shorthand. Houdini seems to look a lot more elegant (I'm sure that establishing the rules would be a crazy collection of nodes) but it seems to lend itself far less to figuring a process out visually. You have to know what you want and how to achieve far more than in ICE. Is that a good take on it? Is it possible to make something like the Lsystem fully nodal?