Hi there,

I just recently saw an advertisement about Houdini on Facebook and thought why not check it out?* I was quite amazed by this tool and started to learn the general things about it, like first off what it can, where it is used etc.

I for myself am currently a student at the SAE institue Bochum (Germany) in Game art & 3D Animations and there I just learned basics of Autodesk Maya and a lot about Autodesk 3ds Max and several other programms etc. in general. However I for myself learned most of the time tutorial paths for 3ds Max, those from the SAE, Digital Tutors and later Pluralsight and became quite fond of it. Unfortunately I've some problems with Max since I started learning it. Those problems are the needs of Plugins which can cause the programm to freeze, crash etc. it's unstability, all those damn annoying bugs, it's heavy load, etc.

While I learned a little bit about Houdini thoughts in my mind developed if I should stay with 3ds Max, switch to Houdini, what are the difference except the obvious ones (f.e. UI), how much is it used in the industry, is their a comparrision in English or German about those two programms etc.

Well and that mainly is it, what I want to know from you is what are the difference in all factors, where does Houdini shines and where not, what does Houdini better than Max and the opposite, how thinks the indursty about it, how much is it used, how difficult is it to learn it, etc. More or less a comparison between those two programs, as wrote in the title.

I appreciate any answere to my questions, which have the aim to help me and other people coming from Max and are interested in Houdini.

Thats it, have a nice day and my greetings,
Logan the Hamster


P.S.: I apologize for my english if there is anything to apologize for, as you can guess it's not my motherlanguage. ^^

*Whoever made this add, good job mate!

I'm not a Houdini expert, but have started learning it. I have worked for a decade in Max though and for the last year in Maya. Generally the “what program is best” question always goes back to what you are aiming at. Do you want to create detailed organic characters, then Houdini is probably not for you at this point in time. Most job requirements in games ask for Maya or Max knowledge. I also suspect that since Houdini is not yet often used as allround solution for games, that many small bits and pieces are still missing that you might need (i.e. I was looking for OpenCollada export, and that doesn't seem to exist).
That being said: For anything with FX and procedural generation (e.g. big landscapes/planets) and architecture, Houdini is the one to go for. It's like the modifier stack of 3DsMax, but on steroids - you never have to ‘collapse’ it and it just works for all modifiers.
I've heard that rigging works great in Houdini. The vast majority of game animators work in Maya though.

So yeh, that's how much I can say with my limited insight into Houdini. So far I'm loving what I see, and I think it has a great future in games. Especially since SideFX seems to want to push the needed features for this area. I'm personally fed up with the buggyness of Maya - it's just no fun anymore.

Thanks for your answere.


I don't believe in “what programm is best”, there simply is none everyone has it's own uniques, it's pros and cons. Maya has MEL, 3ds Max is probably the best alrounder and has Modifier, Houdini is awesome in VFX, Blender is open source, etc. What I want to know is simply how different 3ds Max and Houdini are, except the fact that Houdini is node based.
Furthermore I actually don't know yet what I wanna work as, I would love to work as a Level Designer but could also imagine working as an Environmental Artist. What I can surely say is that I will much more like it, if I can work in the Gaming industry f.e. at Ubisoft, Relic, … than in any other 3D industry sector.

Yesterday I searched the web, on Vimeo, Youtube, … for videos about modelling in Houdini just so I could see how different or similar it is to 3ds Max, do the Houdini people only/majorly work with their nodes or it is like in 3ds Max where u actually work in the viewport etc. Unfortunately it was really difficult to find any, mostly I found videos of people modelling in Houdini who clearly didn't really know what the heck they are doing, but when I found a video of a person who knows what he is doing and is good in explaining it always was just a promotion video to sell tutorials for modelling in Houdini for horrendous prices - $50 for part 1 of a 6 parts long tutorial and each part is just 25min long? No thanks!

I actually worked with Maya for a couple of months back in 2014 when I started studying and I began to hate it. As I said MEL is awesome, but the rest of the programm is pure horror. What bugs me the most ist apart from all those bugs the UI and the controlls which are clearly made for tablets not PC and mouse. Furthermore Maya is constantly crashing, so you are kind of forced to save it every minute which is extremly annoying, because even when you set it on autosave it freezes during a save and when you have a scene/project with lots of stuff it can take a while and during that pray that it doesn't crash. Thats by the way the reason I switched to 3ds Max, but now in 3ds Max 2017 it changed.
3ds Max is now as unstable as Maya, has a ton of bugs, has problems with plug ins, etc. It's like in Maya no fun anymore, especially when you are forced to do one thing over and over again, ‘cause the programm always crashes when you are doing it - Lately I had to do a damn fucking curtain 26 times, ’cause either the programm crashed immediatly I used the cloth modifier or it bugged so much around that the modifier worked incorrectly and forced Max to crash.
Well enough of the bashing now besides that those two programms are still awesome. I wonder right now, does Houdini have such bugs aswell, does it crash from frequently etc.?


At least, pls not only read this thread reply too, it would make me happy.

Greetings
Logan

I also work with 3dsmax for many years and jumped over 2,5 years ago.
If you are willing to learn to houdini, after some months/years you will never look back. because it is better nearly every aspect. community, support, sofwarearchitecture, artist driven roadmap …etc.

now i could use h16 at work for fx stuff. i have to say thanks to all the developer. what an crazy effort to touch every corner of this beast. alone the idea of this layer architecture for hair, ocean and terrain.
an what is the biggest jaw dropping thing…. after 2 weeks release, most new features work so robust and stable. if you see all the new features (some build from the scratch) in a such complex environment. there must be a good softwarearchitecture to do this.

now if you look to max it would be hard or nearly impoossible to make such big changes like h15 to 16 because of the old unflexible underlaying architecture.
or look at old maxscript compared to vex or now opencl wrangle. and so on.

futurewise its good idea to learn houdini.

All 3d apps have their hiccups and crashes and Houdini does sometimes crash. However, that aside Houdini's crashes are few and far between, and usually that is down to me doing something stupid which causes the crash, like overloading my RAM ect. When you said about H16 coming out a few weeks and being very stable, this is because Side FX works alongside major VFX houses whilst in development. Essentially this means that as development continues it is being tested at Major companies at the same time, who give a constant stream of feedback to Side FX, making changes and bug squashing much faster. I don't think Autodesk use this approach at all and do most in house.

For modelling, Houdini is catching up with the other packages and although the workflow is slightly different from say 3ds max, once you get used to it, it is smooth and really quite rapid. Selecting your tools via the viewport tab menu or shelf tools means you can completely ignore the node tree if you so wish. I don't as I like to keep things organised as I go.

Now as Houdini's render engine Mantra is getting significantly faster, I hope to ditch 3ds max completely and use Houdini as my main app. Everything not rendering and modelling at the moment is done in Houdini, but that is about to change for me.

In the case of plugins as you mentioned, Houdini's procedural node based workflows means that you can create your own “Plug-ins” in the flavour of Digital Assets. Now the beauty of this is, that using things like VOP nodes (Vex OPerators)you can create assets with no prior scripting knowledge as all these nodes contain snippets of code within them, also SOPS and other nodes can all be used. All you do is chain a series of nodes together to describe the tools functionality. Very powerful for non-coding people.

Very cool.

> What I want to know is simply how different 3ds Max and Houdini are, except the fact that Houdini is node based.

I would say then, that it's really a paradigm shift. You have to think really different when modeling in Houdini. First of all in how you approach even simple modeling jobs (which will take longer in Houdini) - but also in how you then actually use the benefits of having done it in Houdini (which depending on the assets will pay back the effort ten-fold).
Only Cinema4D is remotely close in the procedural workflow. 3DsMax's modifier stack is more of a poor analogy, since it's so very limited.

I had also some trouble finding resources for Houdini, and especially answers to specific questions. And I found some issues so far with the Houdini Engine integration in Unity and Unreal. I suppose all this has to grow yet.

And I can totally relate to your pain with Maya… I haven't stepped over to 2017 yet, but word on the street is that it's even more buggy than usual :O

First off it's awesome to hear that you can do your own “plug ins” it will surely speed up my future working in Houdini rapidly. It is so good to be not depending on other people who share their Max Plug-ins or not have to be an annoyence to the progger in my uni. <— One more reason for me to learn it.

You said, that I've to think different, procedually to be accurate, but how do I do that? I never worked procedually and furthermore the same goes for nodes too. Concerning the nodes, what each of it does etc. I guess thats not to difficult and is just something you have to learn by heart. As far as I understand it given by those limited free sources (videos) on the net, the difficulty lies in using them together, knowing which nodes does what in combination etc. Am I right with that, at least in general?
I would really aprecciate it when you (can) give me some tipps about working / thinkg procedually.

It is really nice to hear that SideFX is working closely with studios around the world to gather Feedback, detect bugs, etc. Thats a really huge advantage they have against their competitors.
Btw I wonder whats wrong by Autodesk each of their programms is getting more and more buggy and unstable, any ideas?

When we now come back to the thread question: “Houdini in comparison to 3ds Max?” I think we can clearly say that everything in Houdini is based on Nodes, right? That it is far more bugfree, stable, userfriendly and faster than Max. It's far better in FX and VFX than 3ds Max, has uniques like the crowd system and as often said proceduall.
3ds Max on the other hand is definetely the industry standard in both game and architectual stuff. It is quite a nice tool for people entering 3D. Furthermore Max is the allrounder per se, has the best rendering capabilitys, is supporting Vector maps, etc. - I bet you know it already.
Do you agree with me in all that or not, I am eager to read your answeres.


Greetings,
Logan

Maybe you could consider what can be achieved with houdini, that is, everything you can achieve with 3d max you can achieve it in houdini, but all you can achieve with houdini is in 3d max something you can achieve?
But this does not mean that you should use only houdini, 3d max and houdini can be complemented in the same way as 3d max, photoshop, after effect, houdini, too.
When I started to learn houdini I had the feeling that I could never learn, for example, in 3d max, you can never correctly use what is a vector. It is like learning to play chess just by looking…(It is complicated in 3d max to work with vectors.) Although Houdini is the best application… how you use some tools to achieve the required effect is the hardest thing, to see the important thing you need practice. ( or something like that)
An enigma is something that has no solution. In houdini that word does not make sense.

logan_the_hamster
You said, that I've to think different, procedually to be accurate, but how do I do that? I never worked procedually and furthermore the same goes for nodes too. Concerning the nodes, what each of it does etc. I guess thats not to difficult and is just something you have to learn by heart.

Since your a max user you have experienced proceduralism even at a lower end without probably realising it. Take 3ds max for instance.
Add a sphere into the scene. You get a series of parameters to control radius, rows and column amounts. You set what you want, then right click and collapse to editable poly right? So now you realise you needed another few rows and columns. Problem is collapsing the stack has removed the procedural parameters from the sphere and you are now in a polygon modelling mode so to speak. Yes you can CTRL+Z your way to success, but when you have made a lot of changes, you will then have to rebuild what you CTRL+Z your way past.

Not very efficient.

Procedural workflow allows you to “go back in time” and make changes that will propagate through the network and update everything with minimal effort and time. Also you can automate tasks which will auto-update other areas at the change of a parameter.

3ds max's modifier stack is semi-procedural in that you layer on different modifiers to describe the end result. We both know that once max's modifier stack starts to get large, it throws a wobbly and crashes or becomes very slow indeed. Houdini doesn't get this issue even after huge numbers of nodes. Even then you can lock nodes so that the entire network doesn't have to cook to speed things up.

Another nice thing about the node based workflow is, say you drop a grid down and displace it into a terrain of some kind. Now you need another terrain to sit behind it. You don't need to rebuild a whole new terrain, you can simply branch a new node tree from the existing one and make changes. Boom that is 2 terrains generated in a very small amount of time.

On the node side. Open up a fresh scene of Houdini, lay down a geometry node and jump inside. Delete the file operator, and hit the TAB key and drop down any nodes you are interested in (they do not have to be connected to anything as you are not going to use them). Select a node and in the parameters pane hit the “?” button in the top right. This will bring up the help file for that specific node. Have a read through and at the bottom most nodes in the help files come with scene files to open up and explore. These files will have full explanations of what the node is doing and why.

Very cool way of learning.

I spent hours just dropping random nodes down and opening the help files and .hips embedded within.

Would just add here that you're gonna get some serious bias asking in a Houdini forum if Houdini is better

At the end: Just give it a shot. You have the free version. Take a week to follow some tutorials, and then you'll get what it's about and if it's for you.
To me it feels like it works how I put things together in my head anyways. But I know many people that won't touch any math with a yardstick, and thrive in an linear “add, see and adjust” worktlyle (the kinda peeps that never care about their layers in Photoshop). For these Houdini will just not be the one.

A sunny sunday is the perfect day to learn Houdini, isn't it?

Of course you can achieve nearly anything in f.e. 3ds Max as in other tools like Houdini, the question is just how. How fast, efficient, easy/difficult,…? How good is the outcome, can it be already used in f.e. games etc.?
chevita actually I am not really into using several programms which can do the same togehter, except there is a good reason for it. I really like it when you just have to deal with one programm at a time. And now that 3ds Max became so damn buggy and unstable as Maya I think it's a good time to say good bye, at least partly.
Why do you find it so difficult to use vectors in 3ds Max, apart from the fact that it is the only tool that can do it, I don't find it difficult just bulky and it can be quite confusing?!
I'm sure that there is something that you cannot do with Houdini, assuming you ask the right questions. ^^

ragapusta you really brought it (indirectly) on point concerning the effiecency in 3ds Max. One of the big thinks I always will hate about 3ds Max is that once you collapsed your primitive a poly, nurb or whatever it isn't easy to change it anymore, you have to model it which can be quite time consuming. I actually not realized that this is kinda procedual working.
So I really love the possibility that you are always able to edit everything, thats a huge advantage for Houdini in comparison wiht 3ds Max. It is nice to hear aswell that Houdini wont become slow, buggy, etc. when you have tons of nodes in the editor.
I think I will just learn about all those nodes the way you did, I'll write it down (shorted) in my notes book (helps remembering me it), may watch some tutorial where it's used etc. It's indeed a cool way of learning. ^^

oxpal I asked first around in Forum like CG Society, Buzz, 3D Total etc. I never got even one aswere so the mods deleted my threads after max. 10 days. I was asking the same as I do here.
You said that work like your mind, should I investigate in my mind and find out how I think / my mind works?
Fun fact: I am one of those “peeps that never care about their layers in Photoshop”, 'cause Quixel does that for me.

Well then time to keep on learning Houdini. ^^

When I was a regular user of 3d max, I always thought, I would like to be able to modify this in such a way … but I did not imagine that that way of working could be possible, until I started learning houdini. There are so many tools in houdini and every new version adds even more.
For example vdb volume, standard volume and copy stamping. Everything constructible with these tools is unimaginable.

https://vimeo.com/15022451 [vimeo.com]

if you do not know how was made that is becouse you do not know volume in houdini

Here is a few beginners tutorials covering geometry, custom shader building and compositing inside Houdini. Nothing is scripted so when things don't work you see how to find the issues. Author is me so it's a bit of a shamless plug.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqBA97RtpBD6efJHapb2tVeq_AWio6yOo [youtube.com]

logan_the_hamster
You said that work like your mind, should I investigate in my mind and find out how I think / my mind works?

What we find is that students ask endless questions and usually write a lot, whilst artist's try out stuff then ask questions. So if you want to be an artist it's probably time just get stuck in. Good luck!

Guys let me thank you a lot for all of your help, sharing your experience, thoughts, opinions, etc. I learned a lot from it.

And I got hooked up by Houdini, I think it's kinda my new “love” besides Max.
I played around, watched tutorials and followed them, wrote down notes, … in other words learned Houdini yesterday until it was 4am and today it's going to be like that again, probably. ^^
Don't worry I took some breaks, too.

Working with Houdini makes much more fun than with Max, it's much more intuitive, that you can edit everything from the very first step onwards is just amazing. I were able to do all kinds of stuff much faster than I could ever do with Max (I tried several things like modeling assets I did in Max in Houdini or f.e. making and baking normals) and it is far less bulky, covoluted and confusing aka difficult to use.

All in all it's an awesome programm what I will use from now on and someday in the future hope to master. ^^

So thanks again for the help and sorry I asked so much Artye, I am just damn curious about things I am interested in and when there isn't a video, text etc. which is already answering all my questions, well then I'have to be a bit annoying and ask around in forums, sorry.


So after that I'm going back to Houdini now. At least I have to get rid of this: It's an awesome, very friendly, helpfull and polite community here, so pls never change!

See you around,
Logan

P.S.: When I have questions, strugling with some functions of the programm and can't find a solution by my own, but need one fast, do you mind if I message you guys then?

I would ask on the forums rather than a private message. Reason being if some other people get stuck on the same thing, they will be able to find the answer using the forum search function.

Yeah…I would like to add what ragupasta has said by adding…even people like myself who are not ‘stuck’ on the same thing. Many times the topic may cover elements of Houdini that could be applied elswhere or just plain ‘reveal’ something I did just not know.

Posting here openly can be very helpful to more than just the person having the ‘problem’.

It's for that reason I try to make the effort when I post a question about something to be as clear as possible and present it in a way that if someone is reading the topic at hand for the first time, that they may too learn something.

Of course that goes out the window on my cranky days when I'm leaning towards just being a troll.

I will just write a message when I need an answer immediately and cannot wait any longer, which will likely nearly never happen. And I will just ask those who are online atm. When that's not the case I will definitely ask around in the forum.
However thanks for your support.

oxpal
I would say then, that it's really a paradigm shift. You have to think really different when modeling in Houdini. First of all in how you approach even simple modeling jobs (which will take longer in Houdini) - but also in how you then actually use the benefits of having done it in Houdini (which depending on the assets will pay back the effort ten-fold).

I disagree that (simple) modeling jobs are necessarily going to take longer in Houdini. It takes some getting used to, but non-procedural modeling has been getting better and better to a point where I'm not worried about modeling something from scratch using just Houdini.

What held me back initially was this mentality of trying to make everything procedural. Imagine you're doing an extrusion. Instead of simply selecting the polygons in the viewport and extruding them like in any other program, I would try to group the required polygons procedurally and nonsense like that. A lot of the time you won't need to go back and change stuff, a lot of the time you just need a final model without any parameters. So you do what you do in any other package: select vertices, edges and polygons, move them, extrude them, cut them etc. And at the end you have a model that's totally not procedural, and that's ok, nothing wrong with it.

Now those times where you know you'll need the model to be procedural, then you can spend the extra time thinking about good ways to “proceduralize” everything. And of course that's going to take you a lot longer than building the model in another package.

Regarding 3ds max, I use it every day for light tasks (mainly importing and exporting, which in my mind is the only truly remarkable thing about the software, both in terms of speed and file formats). My colleague uses it exclusively for absolutely everything, and he's really good with it. I've seen many people use Max, and he's by far the best and the fastest. But we often talk about how he is using a million different plugins to make everything work the way he wants it. He's a bit like McGyver, combining plugins and scripts and somehow making stuff work. But even he has situations where he goes “well, this plugin doesn't play nicely with that plugin, and that's a problem now”, and really in Houdini it's a matter of combining a dozen nodes and I've got the exact functionality that he was looking for.

I could quote @Chris_Tc word for word, esp that straight on modeling thing and using plugins/scripts in apps ( which is why I left 3DS max long ago. what is this ? 2017 ? 20 years is a long for an app to mature and do things entirely on it's own. ).

Houdini is a pretty decent Poly modeler now.
Just combine it with your main app for the time being if needs be, until you get a hang of it.