I have used Houdini in the past at a few studios I worked at. I loved it and would stay late into the night having fun. A long time ago (1998?) I even made some interactive stuff that moved to music after seeing what some of my friends had done at the IDC.

I would like to pick up apprentice and do a few things:

1) Load my old files. I made games and moving art pieces in Houdini. (ver 3, 4)

2) Learn how to drive scenes with sound input and wav files. The last time I did this was in houdini 3 I think, and it looks like a lot has changed. Are there any tutorials? I have a projector at home and I would love to make interactive art pieces in Apprentice.

Any feedback would be great,

CE

I think your old files should still by and large mostly work.

Some neat stuff was added inbetween H3 and H4 to make life a bit easier in chops.

There is also the microphone to do neat stuff with 3d objects and sound. Neat for those doppler effects.

As for tut's/example files, not too much demand for this stuff so not too many files make it out.

Poke around then ask lots of questions.

Oh and I can still read in my ancient .mot files from sage and something called “odin”. :wink:
Just carefully scan the errors when opening the old file if they come up. Find the offending node(s) and fix them. You can also bust open the original .hip file with hexpand to read the old settings if a particular node actually has changed name or to verify parm settings.

Do you know about the Houdini's derivative ( ) Touch 101? It's made specifically for this kind of works.
http://www.derivativeinc.com/ [derivativeinc.com]

Dragos

Does touch 101 support skinned characters and L-systems, particles, and the like? Can someone toss up a sample file showing a wav being fed into a particle system or something?

I had a project that had worms animating to wav files, but it is corrupt. I haven't used Houdini is ~5 years or more. :\

pangloss
Does touch 101 support skinned characters and L-systems, particles, and the like? Can someone toss up a sample file showing a wav being fed into a particle system or something?

It supports everything that was supported in Houdini 4 (that includes all you asked) and CHOPs are much more developed and tuned in regard to interactivity, real time functionality and control interfaces.
There is a demo available for dowload on the site.

Dragos

Yes, I am currently awaiting the ability to download the trial version.