After the smile faded and I became more and more familiar with Houdini I asked one small question. What keeps Houdini from being used as a general software by a lot of artists? What is in a Houdini workflow that keeps thousands of people from using it in a general sense of creating pretty pictures besides those complex FX stuff. After some though and analysis I came to a conclusion that there really are a few steps that SESI needs to do to attract even more people into using Houdini (especially during time of great instability in software industry in general).
In general artists are used to node based workflow. This is not something that might scare people away. Especially with so much learning materials now available, new shelf in Houdini that simplifies things, and so many workflow enhancements - learning and using Houdini is not scary now at all. I started digging more in this subject matter to see what areas of Houdini might be scaring “artists” from this beautiful software. Lets go step be step:
1. General scene set-up - fairly easy and beautifully orgonized
2. Lighting and Camera - really simple and not much different from other softwares
3. Rendering - EASY
4. UV layout - very streightforeward and beautiful. Might need some more UV unwrapping tools, but in general pointless (see the last point that I am going to make)
5. Assigning materials - very cool, especially with how beautiful groups work in Houdini + material node.
6. Shading - works pretty much the same as in XSI for example - very top notch + has a lot of useful predefined materials (even more then most softwares have) Probably needs some more general materials to make transfer from other packages more easy - like blinn, lambert, phong etc.
7. Animation - big power here with CHOPS. The good thing is that you might not even use chops if you don't want to. But rigging and so forth is very powerful.
8. Dynamics and simmulations - gonna skip this part - no software comes anywhere close to this.
9. Modeling. Now this IS the part that keeps artists away. When you open up houdini, follow some basic tutorials - you're pretty much set and can do most of the stuff - everything is easy and interface and workflow is much more artist friendly then versions before 9.0 But modeling….. yakes… Procedural modeling is beautiful - there is enough nodes to do almost anything. But just general modeling has a much weaker workflow then almost any other software on the market right now. To draw a little analogy, which is very weak but will explain my point. 3DS Max has a stack of operators. Now this is nowhere near what Houdini can do, but it has “operators” that do different things, and you can stack them on top of each other, just like in houdini. But there is one “operator” that does all that “artistic” and “general” modeling - “Edit Poly Tool”. This one operator accomplishes all the modeling needs an artist might use to create geometry. Houdini on the other hand has a lot of seperate Ops that do the same thing, which puts down the workflow of creating complex models on the knees. When I think of creating a scene in Houdini and then render a pretty picture - last thing I want to do is model all the complex geometry in Houdini, but rather import it from another software that is more user friendly in general modeling in artistic sense (Maya or Modo i.e.) But imagine if Houdini had a single node (or several for different surface types) like Poly Edit - that would bring all the polygon editing tools to the viewport or to a right click menu. And you would just go an let the art flow from your brain. I imaging having Houdini be used for illustration, cinematic etc workflow pretty easy, as everything but the modeling is very straightforward and beautiful. I can't express enough how Houdini is beautiful. Just think of it SESI. And with the right advertisement campaign - you can bring TONS of artists on your side. Just explain them that Houdini can do everything the way they used to work plus it has much more under the hood - and that artists will never be limited again as they are with the software they're using. I bet right now, Maya, 3DSMax, XSI, Modo, Cinema 4D are now seeing Houdini as a competitor, because your areas of use don't intersect much. Those software companies are just giving their user base enough freedom to not make them switch to houdini. XSI has ICE, Cinema 4D has some sort of mograph module, Maya in general just very scriptable. And those users, even if they download Houdini Apprentice found themselves not being able to create “pretty pictures” and that's what they do on their free time and sometimes for living. Think about it SESI - and you will atract even more users, just by creating one node and explaining it to the public in the right way. After that user base will be growing like never before. People will be buying HD version and they will have more tools then by buying MODO or similar products. After the user base grows more studios will be switching to Houdini. And this is THE right moment to do this, especially when popularity and interest to Houdini is so high right now, you're just loosing the mass effect that could be created with your todays advertisement campaign.
Guess that's all what I wanted to say
