Staglaitor
To us (artists). - No, that's not true. Houdini is not for us. Houdini is a programmer's world.
Yes and no.
You like the “plasticine” method - you easily sculpt your model using a certain set of actions, without thinking about the processes either in the plasticine or in your hands. This has the right to life. How to dig holes in the garden more conveniently with a shovel. And an excavator, which is a million times more powerful than you with a shovel, will not dig 1 hole faster than you. It's expensive and time-consuming. But if you need to dig the foundation of a building, you and your shovel are no good there. Because you need a drawing, measurements, mathematics, construction equipment. Formally, they dig in both cases, but there is a nuance... Houdini, or rather the procedural method itself - this is the same construction trust that allows you to solve a large number of construction problems if you know how to manage it. Just the ability to quickly wield a shovel cannot be compared with it. You will actually dig holes in your garden much faster with a shovel than you can activate a building trust.
The idea that everything can be expressed in numbers and allow the user to customize and insert these numbers into any parameters and customize any algorithmic interactions is a wide field of possibilities. In proceduralism, you easily scale a well-designed model to thousands of variations. While the manual method is absolutely dead here.
Any complex scene/model may consist of a huge number of submodels or copies. In proceduralism, you can easily play with any quantities, while with your hands - absolutely not.
Houdini's problem is an archaic, inconvenient interface with incredibly strange names, in which the user gets stuck like a fly in a cobweb and a huge number of bugs. But once you understand exactly how ordinary typical actions are done in Houdini, everything becomes much easier.
I myself constantly say here that all newcomers to Houdini start with modeling. But this is where Houdini can drive an unprepared user crazy with its bugs and oddities. You need to be very stubborn to learn how to figure out and work around bugs, and then all the advantages of Houdini will be revealed to you and you will fall in love with its capabilities. In a year, with a slight movement of your hand, you will make a project in which your entire garden will be dug up by a robot, and you will only correct something a little with your hands.