I recently purchased Houdini FX I'd and I'd generally expect/hope at that price to have a fairly robust quality rendering built in to get real time quality feedback of our work.
It makes more sense that render nodes are the rental not Karma since production houses will need them in Quantity and if other customers want to ever see large pieces of work rendered they would pay for it too. Karma should absolutely not be
a “rental” for current FX users, it's unfair because it is Beta -that is if in the future they decide not to make it free with a single instance.
Again additional nodes should/could be offered as rental but not a license strategy that impedes the ability to see professional quality as the standard built-in
display -Houdini was coming out as the pinnacle of what a 3D tool could/should be until i learned about the Karma rental.
Edit: I was a bit concerned that there was no real time PBR shading, I thought it was available when I watched the promos but I didn't realize it only became available in the Stage environment.
I thought I'd give this a mention as well.. please focus on making user controls simple like a single control panel with sliders for the most part for the layout.. for big generators like oceans etc. If people want to go deeper and change some of the nodes that's fine. It seems like there is often 10 steps just to do one thing that is normally simple/efficient in other programs with maybe 1 or two steps. I realize the Power of Houdini that there could be many ways to do things, some better than others and it's usually up to the artist to discover them.
Setting up a material library is a big one.. many programs are providing texture packing & batch import solutions whereby if a customer has a library of thousands of materials he/she can simply give a prefix or suffix to import them like “_nm” custom entered designated to the normal map slots, direct the importer to the folder library and then batch creates full materials automatically for each material name. Mari is one of those programs.. Some assets for Unity does this as well like “Megasplat” or they just accept full libraries like Substances. Mari is another that helps with batch importing RDT photo scanned textures and creates the materials with the correct settings.
If there is a workflow for this please excuse me, I've been looking for a good tutorial on how to do this but there is none.
Sorry if it sounds like a rant, just giving some feedback and overall I feel that Programmers should make things easier, not make everyone else become the programmer no?
