Hello Everyone,

I know I am not the only one. We know we all had spend so much of time in mastering tonnes of nodes, tools, techniques ... and more coming nodes !!! in Houdini BUT in recent times out of nowhere we see things(AI Renders) that scares us and makes us worry whether it is worth putting effort any more on noodling with these nodes and fiddling with zillion parameters, keep iterating on and on and waiting for the chugging renders for hours for that perfect billowy glittering mushroom ball when a kid around the corner spits out a similar explosion shot in a blink.

Here is a quick sample to see where things are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOMnIVT4P2w [www.youtube.com]

So, where should SideFx focus in shouldering our burden so that our artistic ego and mastery is never hurt?
Here is my 1st cent to start with:
Yes. AI renders ...BUT... its not what I expect...BUT I want to have artistic and creative control.
I believe from a 3D Artist's perspective, SideFx should focus their "Research" more on creating the Node network gut creation for us based on the input image/sample video/prompt - (Like Shelf tools - BUT with AI Steroids) Then we can have granular control on the output. The great disadvantage in current AI generated image/video workflow is we need to keep tweaking our prompts endlessly to match our expectation and finally we are only forced to compromise if our taste is high. Instead if Houdini could give us the 3D scene with procedural controls of the same then we are gold.

Please let me know your thoughts.

edited - misread the issue

Cristin spoke a bit about this in the H21 keynote: https://youtu.be/C--08SipCNU?t=248 [youtu.be]