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Alexey Vanzhula
pickled
Why would anyone invest in a system for which support and development can be dropped at any time?
Very funny. Any arguments? Modeler tools exist (at least for me) from 2014. Show me what you have modeled in a destructive manner in stock Houdini, please. And yes, stay away from the modeling plugins, they are senseless
anon_user_89151269
Alexey Vanzhula
Very funny. Any arguments?
Individual pursuits as far as willingness (other opportunities, boredom, etc) or ability (illness, death, etc) to stay on a project are a lot more likely to change than those of an established company.
Alexey Vanzhula
Show me what you have modeled in a destructive manner in stock Houdini, please.
Why? I could show you some things, but I fail to see how's this relevant.

It seems to me that you took it personally and I understand why, you have skin in the game - in the meantime I've learned that Modeler plugin is actually developed by you.
I've watched your last (?) vimeo demo and it looks great. Yet this doesn't alleviate my concerns about 3rd party plug-ins developed by small companies, let alone individuals.
Barrett Meeker
pickled
Here's a cute thought experiment, if your life depended on the speed and quality of a modeling task, what would you choose right now? The essence of my statement can't be watered down with “but I like this or that too” arguments, because I for one, can model in AutoCAD via a command line. Or at least I was able to long ago, but I'm not insane to keep doing it, regardless of how much I enjoyed it.

For modeling speed I use Zbrush. Houdini has replaced Softimage and 3ds max for me but without Zbrush in the workflow maybe Houdini would feel too slow.

My workflow is generally blockout in Houdini (used to be softimage) then sculpt all the details. I like Houdini better for blocking out and procedural modeling than softimage, feels easier to keep things procedural to play with proportions etc.

Modeling improvements would be great though. Is there a way to vote up RFE's ?
anon_user_89151269
There's no way to up-vote RFEs right now. The closest thing to that is to keep your fingers on the pulse of what's being discussed here on the forums and file your RFE on top of what RFE you agree with.

PS not sure why you quoted me with that since you're clearly not the user target I was having in mind. Zbrush with its dynamesh and other tools is the mother of blocking out.
anon_user_89151269
alfred0809
I know that Houdini would be good enough to get by in, but the relative speed of the work is my real concern.
Kudos for distilling the essence of what I've been saying, in so few words.

It's very easy to get bogged down into the mire of sorting out what's right or wrong regarding a complicated issue such as this. We all come with our backgrounds, workflows and opinions and this is rarely helpful for the dev team to figure out what is actually in need to be addressed. In this light, we should see to making sure our concerns and grievances don't continue to live in an abstract or generalized plane and point out clearly what's the problem with one thing or another. Hopefully this thread will morph into a bullet-point like problem describing list, with clearly defined issues, ways to reproduce them and proposed solutions.

I'll start first with this:
has anyone here encountered the problem of having to press “T” twice after selecting a bunch of points in order to transform them?
We'll try to get to the bottom of this with examples and hopefully ways to reproduce it, but we should stay on this point until we have a problem/solution well formulated so that the dev team can address it, should this turn out to be indeed a problem.
GCharb
Houdini is very adept at modelling, but I use 3D Coat for my sculpting/modelling/texturing, voxel sculpting is extremely fast for concepting, it is better at texturing than Painter, at least IMHO, and 3D Coat has the best retopo tools I have seen so far, better than Topogun or Retopoflow, Houdini + 3DCoat do everything that I need, and 3D Coat is a lot cheaper than ZBrush, you can either rent or buy a permanent license, but ZBrush is still the king at sculpting, again, IMHO!

3D Coat, by Pilgway [3dcoat.com]
HGaal
GCharb
Houdini is very adept at modelling,
Don't you think that Houdini is purposefully mocking users? It is difficult to rationally explain, for example, such a polyfill in comparison with a free blender. It is possible to do it correctly, evenly, beautifully, but Houdini seems to be doing it crooked on purpose.
Alexey Vanzhula
HGaal
GCharb
Houdini is very adept at modelling,
Don't you think that Houdini is purposefully mocking users? It is difficult to rationally explain, for example, such a polyfill in comparison with a free blender. It is possible to do it correctly, evenly, beautifully, but Houdini seems to be doing it crooked on purpose.
No. Most likely this is incorrect in Blender, because its modeling tools became outdated back in the 90s. Also, such holes can be filled with manual retopology tools in 3D Coat. But it's better to delete the model and remake it from scratch in 3D Coat using voxels.
GCharb
HGaal
GCharb
Houdini is very adept at modelling,
Don't you think that Houdini is purposefully mocking users? It is difficult to rationally explain, for example, such a polyfill in comparison with a free blender. It is possible to do it correctly, evenly, beautifully, but Houdini seems to be doing it crooked on purpose.
Why would SideFX (not Houdini), purposefully mock users, in what universe does that make any sense? 🤔

Blender modelling tools, like pretty much everything else in Blender, are more than 15 years old, and might it be possible that you are just using Houdini modelling tools the wrong way, because here the polyfill seems to do a very decent job, see pictures below!
PaQ WaK
HGaal
GCharb
Houdini is very adept at modelling,
Don't you think that Houdini is purposefully mocking users? It is difficult to rationally explain, for example, such a polyfill in comparison with a free blender. It is possible to do it correctly, evenly, beautifully, but Houdini seems to be doing it crooked on purpose.

Hello, mind to post the model ? Polyfill / QuadGrid seems to work well to solve this, but maybe you found a special scenario.
GCharb
PaQ WaK
Hello, mind to post the model ? Polyfill / QuadGrid seems to work well to solve this, but maybe you found a special scenario.
He needs to select Quadrilateral Grid, and play with the corner Offset (see the picture I posted), those who keep complaining are usually the ones who do things the wrong way, but they keep blaming the software, in this case Houdini!
PaQ WaK
In those simple examples there shouldn't be a need to 'play' with corner offset. If Blender is doing a better job at finding this initial arrangement it does pick my curiosity. Beside there is no need to share judgments on people.
GCharb
PaQ WaK
In those simple examples there shouldn't be a need to 'play' with corner offset. If Blender is doing a better job at finding this initial arrangement it does pick my curiosity. Beside there is no need to share judgments on people.
In my example, I only played with the offset to illustrate the setting, in this example offset is at zero, and it still works perfectly with default settings!

Also, I got a bit testy because I am consistently being harassed by Blenderheads who want me to use Blender alongside Houdini, or are constantly comparing Blender with Houdini, implying that Blender is somehow better than Houdini, which makes no sense to me, the Blender community is more akin to a cult than an artist community, at least IMHO!
HGaal
PaQ WaK
Hello, mind to post the model ? Polyfill / QuadGrid seems to work well to solve this, but maybe you found a special scenario.
Easily. Here is the file.
In 90% of my attempts the polyfill did not make the correct mesh across the grid. I made N-gon and cut it by hand. As a result, I made an HDA polysplit in a cycle and began cutting it with one node. That is, he used Houdini's advantages to partially eliminate Houdini's disadvantages. But minus the lost hours.
Polyfill makes a correct mesh only with a certain ratio of points or a large number of them. On most of my holes, the polyfill produced crooked grids. Or diagonal ones, which are not suitable for symmetry. Developers could easily fix this problem by adjusting the number of columns in the created grid, like in Blender to adjust the grid. But why ? Formally, does the polyfill close the hole? That's enough, user!
HGaal
GCharb
I am consistently being harassed by Blenderheads who want me to use Blender alongside Houdini, or are constantly comparing Blender with Houdini
This is easily and rationally explained. You have nothing to do with it.
If we made our own unreasonable demands for functionality, it would be strange; the question would be, where did you get them from, these desires of yours? Therefore, we compare blender, saying that these functions are easily accessible, we do not expect any supernatural things, they were easily implemented even in a free program by several crumpled developers. Why can't we get these same simple basic things in the same quality in a great Houdini program with very qualified people? We do not require anything unique and complex. Simple basic tools, convenient and working without a lot of bugs. Is it too arrogant to expect so much from Houdini?
PaQ WaK
So far I couldn't output the 'expected' result using Houdini polyfill, there is always a rotation in the patch.

I'm not a Blender specialist, but it's not like there is an auto fill solution either, you need to tweak the number of span until the 'magic' number 7. Maybe there is an other function for this (I'm using face/grid fill).

Looks like a valid enhancement request to propose, even tho I would rather no have to find the magic span number.
("modeler" quadfill is based on Houdini native polyfill, and doesn't seems to resolve this either).
GCharb
There is nothing wrong about expecting tools to work the way they should, but you need to learn how the tools works before you can complain about them, and as I demonstrated, based on your previous examples, the polyfill, in these instances, works just fine in Houdini, so the problem wasn't Houdini, at least not in these occurrences, I haven't looked at the file you shared, and maybe in that particular case the Polyfill doesn't work as you would like, but I am sure I could find circumstances where it would not work as intended in Blender as well, but to say that the tools in Houdini are crap because in one instance they don't work the way you want them to, is widely dishonest! 🤔
PaQ WaK
There is no need to have hours of houdini learning here, it's an obvious case where the polyfill output a non optimal result. I would rather understand why and how to solve this than continue to argue about "Blender vs Houdini" non sense. It makes this whole discussion painful.
GCharb
PaQ WaK
There is nothing to learn here, it's an obvious case where the polyfill output a non optimal result. I would rather understand why and how to solve this than continue to argue about "Blender vs Houdini" non sense. It makes this whole discussion painful.
I am sure there is a way to solve this particular issue, like I said, the polyfill works very well the vast majority of the time, personally I never had an issue with it, my point here is that you can't call a tool crappy, or say that SideFX is mocking its user base, just because in one instance, one tool doesn't work as expected!
HGaal
PaQ WaK
Looks like a valid enhancement request to propose, even tho I would rather no have to find the magic span number.

Selecting a span is an excellent solution, allowing you to adjust to the grid with several options. Sometimes I just need lines, or lines with one separator, and sometimes a grid.
I like the quadliteral fan in the polyfill, it's a great thing, sometimes very convenient. But the grid is not, the algorithm is not the best, and there is no manual adjustment. With my bevels, in 90% of cases this did not work as I needed, unfortunately.
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