but drawing simple curves in Houdini is a nightmare, my workflow at the moment is to create them in Illustrator, import them into 3dsmax and then import into Houdini, which is ridiculous….
With the exception of re-establishing two handles of the same anchors linear tangency (which can be done in two ways that I know of),
The only difference between the curve tool(as bezier) in Houdini and that of say those of photoshop and illustrator is that the handles in Houdini do not have a user interface line drawn to the anchors they own/control.
But they are still there and are just as easy to use (curve tool) as other programs.(with the exception as mentioned before, which is also easy to accomplish but I do admit it slows down the workflow somewhat to accomplish).
Even so, if one is resorting to drawing those curves outside of Houdini then bringing them back in, the extra time to do that would be saved if one understood how Houdinis' curve tool in its' execution is more similar to other programs curve tools than it is different.
The reason it is more alike than different is because bezier curves are constructed the same way mathematically no matter what program they are done in - and they require the same input.
I've seen this ‘complaint’ in the forums from time to time but cannot help think it is because they don't understand how a bezier curve works from a mathematical point of view.
One doesn't need to do or know the math but - to Olaf:
Maybe in your video, in part, you could do a side by side comparison of the same end resulting curve being drawn Houdini to other programs.
This would as mentioned before show the similarities (because they are both bezier and under the hood need/use the same input);
I think most ‘problems’ would be ‘solved’ if people could be shown the difference between an anchor point and a controlling handle point in houdini (because the lines aren't drawn for you showing this) - and how if a point is added or subtracted changes what are the controlling handles and what are the anchors.