I am new to Houdini and a hobbyist. When I learn a new package, I always practice building the same object below. It's called an “Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere”. The corner piece of the sphere is a challenging (at least for me) object to build in a way that is ‘perfect’ and clean in SubD.
Consider it my acid test to verify that I am comfortable with the basics of the modelling portion of an application.
![](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Airs1.jpg)
I have dreamed of being able to use Houdini for almost 15 years. I always thought it was only for rocket scientists and that you needed a PhD to achieve the simplest results.
I am sure that the current iteration of the application is far more accessible than it used to be in the past. However, I am amazed at the result of spending about 10 hours with tutorials. I have NEVER been able to achieve such a clean and continuous surface with any application that I used in the past whilst retaining full control over the cage.
I always seem to either end-up with either a soup of control loops, having to retopologise after a Nurb'ish/Boolean'ish sledgehammer approach, or end up with a good cage that wasn't 100% perfect (I am a bit OCD).
Houdini is the first application in which I ever managed to achieve this level of perfection without having to push vertices along guides manually.
Thank you SideFX! You just improved my standard of living by 250%
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