You can model anything with Houdini. The thing that bothers a lot of people and what lots of thread end up being about is a comparison of different features found in other packages and the time it takes to model in Houdini and the lack of viewport destructive modeling tools/handles. Now, If you can ignore the things I´ve just mentioned and just model with what Houdini offers then you have great modeling toolset in Houdini. It is what it is and you can do all types of models and a lot of tricks in H you wont find elsewhere. And as adrianlazar says Houdini is the king of props/assets.

All the rules that concerns topology is the same in Houdini as everywhere else so you do not need specific character modeling tutorials for Houdini. The polygon tools is the same for any type of shape and Nurbs are Nurbs. With that being said I personally use Wings3D for most of my polygon modeling even when I have done jobs in Maya to many is very solid modeling and I have lots of mel scripts there to aid the modelling but to me wings is my ideal polymodeller, Im good. But most of that is based on the fact that I can do preselection and some other stuff that is really fast in Wings, perhaps H12 will lure me back in to the polydungeon in H. So try it and if you like it stick with it and if not use a dedicated modeling app as companion.

Yeah I been having difficulties accessing Odforce on and off for some weeks now, hope it all solves for you guys.

dsledge
Does anyone know if sidefx is working on GoZ support for ZBrush interaction?
I know Maya, CD4 and Modo already support it, would be great if Houdini is working on it.

http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/tutorial.php?lesson=GoZ [pixologic.com]

My guess is that it is at least possible to make one. If one can do a connection for Maya then why not for zbrush.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=20539 [sidefx.com]

Kuba , I do as Simon meaning I first project everything that needs to be trimmed then do it all in one trip sop.

kuba
Hi Paul,
(btw. Houdini doesn't support multiple trims on one surface).
:?

You have some good points but are you sure about just that? I´m working with a nurbs model right now with what seems like multiple trims but perhaps I misunderstand you.

I'm having a minor issue with paint as well. If I change the operation mode in parameters window it doesn't commit the change for the actual mode in the viewport itself, and vice versa. Seems a bit weird, should it be like that?

I know that you can control the lod attribute for OpenGL with AttribCreateSOP but I don’t know how to pass it to Mantra.

Don´t know how it could be achieved easily in Houdini but how about rigging the character in Houdini and exporting it to Blender for animation and then importing it back?

It is awesome indeed. Mantra feels like a film-production secret.

This will end up in my tutorial shelf indeed.

Yes I´ve noticed this as well and it happens at corner point that have only two edges connected. Is this really following the catmull clark scheme ? If I remember correctly s-div surfaces will subdivide and smooth any “open” edges. Actually I’ve seen this behavior in another application, mudbox, where it behaves the opposite meaning it will smooth out the edges that have a maximum of two edges connected to one point and crease the edges on any inner edges that 2 or more. The nicest way of handling subdivision that I´ve seen is MentalRay integration into XSI where you have catmull clark subdivision for quads in combination loop scheme for triangles. This basically means that for any triangles it will triangulate divide and for quads it will use regular division and it gives the user absolutely no poles that will pinch the surface. It would be nice to read a little bit more in-depth about Houdini subdivision other than what can be found in the manual. SideFX team?

Could a custom collada exporter be built using HDK with FCollada?

http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/FCollada [collada.org]

I dont know if it is being used by blender because of licensing issues but Blender has a Collada exporter written in Python. Could Python in Houdini be used for custom exporters as well ?

http://colladablender.illusoft.com/cms/content/blogsection/6/45/ [colladablender.illusoft.com]

Ok so as of 9.5.213 you’ve made the change in composite view to have the COP operators as default. I don’t know if it was because of the discussion during the beta but it was a good move for increasing the usability in Houdini.

Thanks.

Not that I want to completely take your focus away from Houdini but why do you need Houdini for real-time visualization? Houdini ´s selling point is not real-time and derivative´s codebase is not up to date even if it is “optimized” for real-time. If it is exclusively Python in a 3D app you’re looking for I would suggest having a look at Blender actually. Seeing from its latest development on its Game engine I would highly recommend it, perhaps you can use both Houdini and Blender. And Blender is one of the fastest app when it comes to viewport interaction and animating objects with fast playback. If you’re good at python I think you can squeeze a lot from Blender and really have no problem to have Houdini and Blender work together. Check out http://www.yofrankie.org/ [yofrankie.org] to see where blender Realtime Game Engine is heading.

JColdrick
1. You save at critical points(which might be constantly during a critical juncture!) instead of random points which require you to hunt through files and *hope* you caught all the things you really needed. Saving at critical points means stepping back is instant, not a flow-distracting and error-prone search.

Something that would be cool though is incremental autosave that audits and logs the difference between files. I’ve never seen it in any software but how neat it would be. I save often and when I want to go back through my .000x files it is sometimes difficult to remember what changes there were even if the saves are critical.

Yes that was a good answer JRGauthier. Perhaps this is a completely different discussion and I really like your character don’t get me wrong there But my first thought when I opened up your MrBall scene was that it would be nice if the controls stayed in place so I could move the legs around fast without thinking if they would turn up in a unpredictable position far away from the foot. The reason to why I was asking is because sometimes when moving objects around in the viewport they have a tendency to go away. I am mainly a modeler but I also setup character, in Maya that is (Doing character setups is something fairly new to me but I’ve done modeling for a few years and to be honest I have very little experience from animation so I´m still learning).But when doing modeling I enjoy for instance having automatically locked vertices on 0 in X-axis (construction plane in Houdini)because it makes it easy to create a mirror and always having the vertices on place no matter how fast I work and I can be really loose and work fast and intuitive. And it is in those lines I´m thinking that the foot follows the control but the control itself never offsets too far away so one can just be less careful so to speak.

cheers

Fun character JRGauthier . I have a sort of general question about rigs. I’ve seen it a couple of times in Maya and in your ball character that people create animation handles that have unlimited translate range, meaning that I can move the character controls very far away from the actual object being animated. I’m not working as an animator per se so I don’t know but wouldn’t it be more intuitive to have control limits in a range relative to the characters “volume” so to speak?

Very true kuba. For surfaces I would probably carve out a curve that I extruded.

Perhaps its not what youre looking for but if you would do it manually you select the last or first point in the curveSOP and by shift+doubleclicking outside the curve re-enter the create state again and start adding points. Another way would be to add a new curve then merge it with the previous one and then use JoinSOP. Having persistent point display will also allow you to edit the joined curve as one without an additional edit SOP.

I guess you’re right photex. I’ve recently started working in a game company where we have a custom exporter from Maya to the game-client. And it is doing a split upon export.

photex
by the time you export for engine you're still going to be drawing a separate point for each varying normal.

I´m not sure about that though. Having double points for skinned objects doesn’t really make sense for optimized performance either. If you take the .obj format and open it up as a text file you’ll find the same point count as you had in the source app and an accompanying “vn” attribute for each vertex normal. But it might be as you say that some engines do it that way.