please make sure you send rfe's to support at sidefx. The more they hear this stuff the more likely it is to make it into the package. And believe me if they hear or see a good idea it will eventually make it in.

My Background is mainly maya/rhino for modeling.I think modeling in Houdini is much more relaxed than in maya. The history in maya drives me nuts often. tabs and tabs and more tabs. menus and submenues and subsubmenues…it's cumbersome.
BUT: I can access tools with hotkeys. i would love to have hotkeys for some OP's. like polyextrude, polysplit etc. the new shleves are great, but I have to find and click…hitting a key is faster!
Or maybe a right click menu with the most common task sensitive menus like in Maya would be fantastic.

Btw: is there a way to use Alt instead of space for entering view mode. And Space instead of TAB as Tool menu?

You know if you hit tab the last few operators you have used are always at the bottom. You can customise that list to any length you like. That's pretty quick to use. Maybe not as quick as a hot key but pretty useful.

You can also assign Hotkeys to the shelf tools. Just right-mouse on the tool, choose Edit Tool… go to the Hotkeys tab. There are four context for the hotkeys. For the modeling tools, the Scene Viewer is probably most appropriate.

As for the Alt for viewing, I think there is some environment variable that you can set.

The keys that invoke the TAB menu are also customizable in the Hotkey manager (in the main menu Edit > Hotkeys…). The easiest way to find the hotkey symbol for the tab menu is to use “Search…” in the upper right corner of the manager: click the “Matching Existing Hotkey:” field, then press <Tab> key and hit Find. You should see the “Toolbar Menu” in the list, if you click it the manager window will jump to that hotkey symbol, and you will see that there are two hotkey keys assigned: Tab and Backspace.

I am not sure if you will be able to assign space as a hotkey, but maybe some other key will be good enough.

I found out that it's possible to assign hotkeys to the operators in the shelve, simply by shift+ctrl+alt leftclicking them!

Ic an assign a hotkey to spacebar, but I don't find a way (ENV variable???) to assign alter spacebar with ALt for view changes.

yes, shift+ctrl+alt can be very very useful. For shelf tools it will probably set a global hotkey (and not many are available), but that's fine. The scene viewer context may offer more free keys to assign, though.

Hmm, indeed I cannot quickly find the environment variable that enables the ALT key to tumble. I'll try to look further, though maybe I got confused (which happens more often than I would like to ).

Also, note that the space bar is assigned as a hotkey for the “Volatile View Operation” in /Houdini/Panes/Geometry Viewers/Operations. You can assign other hotkeys for it, but you won't be able to assign ALT as the keyboard hot key because it is treaded as a modifier.

lukasdesign
My Background is mainly maya/rhino for modeling.I think modeling in Houdini is much more relaxed than in maya. The history in maya drives me nuts often. tabs and tabs and more tabs. menus and submenues and subsubmenues…

Maya was made mostly by Alias' coders, I think.. It's a combination of
three code bases.. But all packages before Maya, on Alias side, were
notorious for breaking the laws of HCI.. Mainly, menus, within menus, within
submenus.. Someone at alias has a talent for making menus, but no common sense..

At one point I remember seeing a poster for Alias 7 about
3 by 2 feet, of nothing but menus, to help people locate functions..
Someone should have taken them to school, that's insane..

el_diablo
BTW…This is how a head model looks in Houdini. Just some trivia. Notice the first op…

Took too much time, too many right clicks. Still felt good somehow.

Nice head, awful lot of construction history.. I think it would
be better if the construction history in some cases could just be dropped,
or just be able to cache away the construction history and load it back if you want to change the history, because you want construction history down the road , but not the computational activity associated with its presence during a modeling process.

Wolfwood
I don't mean to take away from your points, since they are all valid, but I'd like point out to everyone that you can modify the Tab Menu. Generators, Filters, Managers, and Generic are locked, but you can add, remove and modify all the other entries. You can't nest them, but its better than nothing. (The Managers toolbar doesn't need to be displayed in the Viewer, since you can only interact with it through the network editor.)

I'm kinda on the outside looking in, I am looking at this thread more just to see what sort of problems I'd be running up against learning Houdini.. But there was a package before Maya called 3Design, it's what inspired some of Maya's tools.. The idea was to use popup menus instead of shelves and such.. To reduce the amount of information on the screen use the context of the process to offer say relevent operations. 3Design was completely popup driven, only 3 sets of menus, but it was just a modeling package it didn't do anything else. And it didn't have construction history. When in a modeling process the thing to do is remove all text and icons from the view and try to turn it into as much a analog process, like sculpting clay.. The more technical, the more difficult it is to focus on the important things..

The one major problem I had with Alias is learning
what functions I could apply when.. It would have been so much better
if the functions that were relevent and popular were always offered in
the context of the use, maybe Maya has that.. But make it possible
to avoid errors by not offering erroneous choices.. One idea, say the ability
to select any kind of geometry and query the database of functions for
all relevent operations, check the definitions of the operations and what
they do, then apply the operation that makes the most sense. Sort of
like googling for functions based on the use context. Also have the system
tell when no related functions exist in a context and maybe give a diagnosis of why.

But I think what would make an interface more intuitive is the ability to
accidently learn stuff without being stopped in the process.. But the more features/functions one has, the more confused one will be.. But the power is to have all the features. So query based on relevence (best fit) and context (given what is selected) ..

Also I'd reduce functions that achieve the same results. It's nicer when
one finds a tool that can be applied a number of different ways. I just
had an iea, how about allow people to rig 3D widgets with functions constructed from sliced construction history, scripts or just alias commonly
use operations and associate them with sliders on the widget.. Then
allow one to pull up a widget when say a function key is hit. Drag
wires from the widget to select geometry, they click on a button on the
widget, to apply the function to the geometry.. If it fails, permit the
construction history to appear in the node window, and allow the user to
fix the connection.. The idea is not so much to do what you can do with procedural modelling, but to reduce the visibility of the interface and
permit people to create their own tools, possibly allow them to create
scripts to determine the relevence of the tool to the operation, or to perform transformations on the data to make a tool polymorphic.. As one
would do in C++ with operator/function overloading..

Also permit the creation of scripts that apply construction history based
on select geometry.. What would be the 3D equivalent of a regex expression.. Do that..

As for context sensitive menus and such, the purpose is to reduce the chances to fail.. The deal is, if everything looks like a nail, it will get hit, so select the most valid nails, so the user is always successful, lost, but successfully lost. Then allow them to back track.. And find a better approach..

rofthorax
Nice head, awful lot of construction history.. I think it would
be better if the construction history in some cases could just be dropped,
or just be able to cache away the construction history and load it back if you want to change the history, because you want construction history down the road , but not the computational activity associated with its presence during a modeling process.

You can use the lock flag, the red one at the left of the node to freeze yout network pu to this node, you don´t lose yout historic and not need to recalculate previous nodes too, also you can unload the node using the same flag, I think that you have to ctrl-click on it, so at the same time you lock you free all the unnecesary memory used by previous calculations.
If you aldo need to clear your network a little hide previous nodes using the popup menu of the node, right clock over the node icon to get it.
Try to clean and freeze your claculations in Maya while still not losing your historic, simply you cant

polybevel working on curves would be nice…

not 100% sure what you need but try the extrude sop. I think people over look this little gem now poly bevel is around.

Simon
not 100% sure what you need but try the extrude sop. I think people over look this little gem now poly bevel is around.

Yes Smon I am pretty sure that the extrude sop can make extrusion in other types of geometry rather than only polis.

polybevel working on curves would be nice…

I think this would be the “fillet” tool in say AutoCAD. You can do this with the Fillet SOP. It works on any type of curve (Poly, Bezier NURBs).

For it to work on Polygons, it is similar to AutoCAD in that the lines must be individual segments. If you have a continuous poly curve, you can quickly dice it up in to primitive segments using the Carve SOP with First U and Second U set to 0 and 1 respectively and choose Breakpoints “Cut At All Internal U Greakpoints”.
If the curves touch at the endpoints, you can pull the offset in using the Left U and Right U values.

The curves do not have to touch.

If the segments are polys, then you get a straight chamfer. If they are NURBs, you get an arc.

Thanks Jeff, that is indeed what i am looking for. To bad the fillet SOP can't make rounded curves on polygons but, hey, it's Monday, you can't have everything on Monday. I should come a long way with the carve and the fillet sop.

so its been a while for this thread. started over 4 years ago. what do you think guys. has sidefx improved houdini as a modeler yet?

nope it's still just as good or just as bad depending on your opinion, hasn't really seen any changes over that time.

I saw this post looking for something else, and being a modeler, I just could not resist to chime in…

I originally started my character modeling career in Maya, and eventually got introduced to XSI (which mind you… since this was before Maya 2009, it was quite an eye opening experience…. especially loved the mod tool… great workflow overall!)

very recently I have started using Houdini and, coming from having used both maya and softimage for a while, I gotta say Houdini is got some really cool stuff going for it….! I mean, my first impulse of course was to find a lot of the same workflows that I had used previously in Houdini, but once I got more used toward using SOPs the way they are meant to be used, I feel that much of what I could do on the other programs I can do in houdini just as easily…!

Latest versions of Maya and XSI may have the mod tool for organic modelng? I was able to reproduce that workflow with an edit and a ray SOP. Edge looping selecion feels just as intuitive in Houdini (maybe a little easier in XSI) and the polysplit can behave either like the maya one, or it can also just slice edge loops right through the middle

I have not had a chance to test it for resirfacing of hi res models, but can already think of some creative ways to setup that workflow looking forward to try it out

For Uvs though, I gotta say I am still in love with Headus UVs…

Anywho, just wanted to throw my opinion on the pool

I think there is definately some common themes emerging here and this thread is turning into something useful for Sesi. Everyone has different examples but you can see fairly clearly where the frustations lie and where the improvements could be made.

jamec9869
I think there is definately some common themes emerging here and this thread is turning into something useful for Sesi. Everyone has different examples but you can see fairly clearly where the frustations lie and where the improvements could be made.

Problem is if SESI can or want to allocate resources to imprive modelling in Houdini.
Unfortunately I think is not the most demanded area of improvement by clients.
Similar problem is hapening with character animation.