Hi!
I'm new to Houdini and 3D. I consider to use it for cinematic rendering. So no realtime or gaming. Mostly environments and hard surface. Some animations, but mostly camera only. No rigging.
During my research I didn't find good answers to these three questions:
(1) Considering my goal (HQ cinematic renderings), is it possible to work without retopology?
Reason for asking: I want to use boolean operations and other procedural mesh operations. I think this could save me a lot of time, especially since I want to do environments with a lot of objects. As far as I have learned, these methods (esp. boolean operations) are not really good for getting a clean mesh topology. But do I need a clean topology at all for my purpose? Or is this more an optimisation step for games and rigging? Could I just work with high polygon meshes and ignore quads? Or is this considered as wasteful, messy workflow?
(2) I also would like to use triplanar mapping instead of texturing using UVs. Same story here: I learned that UV unwrap and mapping is quite labour intensive and more important: requires a good mesh topology. My thinking was to use procedural materials (shaders?) most of the time and some textures for hero objects - applied with triplanar mapping. So no UVs at all. Is this plausible? Or am I missing something?
(3) I noticed a sculpt node in Houdini but didn't really find some reference regarding manual view port sculpting. Is this possible in Houdini, for some basic organic shapes? Or is an external solution like ZBrush mandatory?
Thanks for any advice!