hello why don't you post your .hipnc file?

mandrake0
in what age did you had the touch with houdini 1.0 at a age of 10? you look damn young so maya didn't spoild so much *haha*

I was in grad school at the time! So that was 1996-1999. So I landed in grad school in my mid twenty somethings.

There were no VOPS…and there were no DOPS…actually POPs weren't even there…no Volumes….no ROPS either!!!

I had SOPs and COPs…and man it was great because regardless of what was not available…the user experience worked for me in regards to what we *had*

I remember being stupefied by the ability to render out sequences of geometry…things we take for granted today were mystical to many of us yesteryear…

CHOPs were confusing…now it isn't(most of it anyway)….but yeah the journey was deep and detailed.

Hscript was waaaay easier than MEL.(although python is intense for me…as in I can read it and follow along…but I have Kindle books, etc. for quick reference)

I was clueless to Renderman so I used Mantra…and it was NOTHING compared to what we have access to today.

even without all that I loved using Houdini.

So basically yeah I am back 20 years later and it is just amazing. I have a mac now(trashcan) and I can use the package to achieve a decent amount of complexity…but while I am reacquainting myself with DOPs…for the last few months its been all about upping my Vex/Vops game.

it is so nice to see Houdini in a incarnation where I always dreamed it would be.

My eternal gratitude to sidefx for maintaining my preferred vehicle of thought.

Chronon
Neat, it'll be interesting to see the perspective and insights of someone with your level of expertise and history with Houdini.

Hello Chronon!

It is a pleasure to connect with you.

the truth is I thought I was a houdini hotshot once I got my reflexes into it.

looking back through the eyes of age I confess to knowing Jack A. Buttkist about most everything in general.

I study coding now and I can grab code and dissect it…I guess I have reading comprehension of code.

I am good at modeling now…and working in maya did serve a purpose.

That being said…I love extrapolating on the examples provided by others…I think that was the best part about houdini…they always provided examples in the form of obj networks…stuff that you could break down.

I have to admit though…when I saw the animation of the Age of Ultron…and certain other movies it gave me a bit of a houdini chubby…at which point I realized I had to go back, sit down and see how people used it for look development…and how people established ways of using it in production.

I hope I can make a good portfolio and blog fast enough to make it into a Star Wars movie or series or something…something I can show my boy when he grows up.

http://urubolous.tumblr.com [urubolous.tumblr.com]

Hi guys I started using Houdini back when it was released as 1.0

I had no idea how vast and incredible it would be.

I had to learn maya for a job and I finally made it back to the States after living overseas for ~12 years.

Life happened and now I am a Dad. I got situated with my workstation and started studying Python, Vex and VOPs.

My blog is meant to detail issues and realizations that I came across as I got back up to speed with houdini.

I would love to hear from everyone and network with other houdini users.

Special thanks to Rohan Dalvi, Digital Tutors, Jeff Lait, Jeff Wagner and countless other people who have helped me in the past…my intent is to add more mental mass to Python and immerse myself with all the new material available.

I hope to hear from people and to make new contacts

thanks!

Thank you for such a detailed and kind response.

Yes I have the Rohan Dalvi videos.

I think that was some of the best money I ever spent!

to be honest I am happy as a pig in shit with Houdini and Mantra…but I do know how hard it can be for others…I think it is due to the age we live in. Many of us(myself included) don't want to have to think our way around limitations. When you see some of the Math and programming the houdini is now capable of…and even more so in release 15…it's like the Neanderthal scene in 2001 with the monolith.(start the soundtrack)

The videos show you what is there…but the difference between a manual(text or otherwise) and a guide is similar to the difference between a calculator and a Math teacher.

The teacher(along with the textbook) guides you to a deeper understanding of the subject matter. The calculator is there so you dont spend all day and night doing one or two problems…indeed…with Houdini as the calculator you can do hundreds of problems…it is truly vast.

It was not always this way. There was a time when Houdini was 1.0…and mantra was just a baby.

Today there is so much information about various aspects of houdini…but let's face it…what people are asking for here is a freebie.

I think that if you want to render outside of houdini on an Indie license…then write out an obj sequence…otherwise commit to learning what is your eyes are after in the renderer you are desirous of…and build your own asset…or ask how to get that special aspect of the renderer into houdini…it could be something simple like learning how to instance your lights instead of using brute force GI….etc.

cheers!

I will buck the trend and say the following.

I would rather stay with mantra and get a deeper feature set and documentation that would show us how to get the features that we think we want from other renderers into houdini.

I feel the same way about Nuke and COPS…I would rather stay in COPs and not have to even consider NUKE…especially if both use Python.

I just see it as a better long range solution…and yes it does take a bit more intellectual inertia of setting up assets and getting everything centralized in your projects…but its still saves you loads in the long run…and if you are an Indie license owner like me…I don't want anymore software investments until I can get a full houdini license.

When I look at the Age of Ultron articles….and they did all that in mantra… I think that we need deeper documentation to tell us the INDIE userbase how to get that kind of workflow into our projects.

online tuts

on how to set up a tiled render

a universal primer on rendering in all its shapes and forms

same thing with Materials and Textures.

The documentation gives you the definitions in a clinical kind of vocabulary…but seeing how easy it is in another renderer does not mean it cannot be done in houdini's mantra/cops/rops…we just need a dedicated primer that is constantly updated.

if you look at greyscalegorillas site it is replete with tuts, articles and assets that really sell the cinema4d renderer. I think the same could be done for houdini…and again…this would mean a better profit margin for the indie developer.

thank for this tip. For some reason my collision object stopped working on an unrelated project. I tried everything and it was this tip that helped me fix the problem.

very much appreciated.

i was curiously daydreaming…like of something almost impossible but cool looking…like giving each component of the pyro effect an shader that you would usually associate with them…and also for procedural modelling for illustration

I will try it out after work today… :twisted:

thanks for taking your time to answer

dear lord baby jeebus…you have given me so much inspiration with those examples…THANKS YOU

ops:

forgot to ask…how would you seperate the smoke from the fire…in order to vary the materials

I just had an idea of how cool it would be to render fire as a glassy surface…so how does one convert the voxel's to polys?

thanks in advance.

pretty please with sugar on top…

contributors in this forum is why I love houdini…its not just a really sweet piece of software that gets better and better.

its a community of real people that are responsive to their community.

I wrote on the cgtalk foum about the problems with maya and how its core seemed to be basically neglected…and how its important not just to add new features…but invest time in fixing problem areas.

but I think the best imporvement I have seen in the past year has been the dedication of making tutorials and primers available to everyone.

back in the days of 2.5 you couldn't have dreamed about that.

thanks again pete

hi peter, thank you for all of your contributions.

I wasnt talking about mantra….but more maya's software renderer…I want an area light solution that provides soft illumination where it is supposed to…with different optimization settings…according to the needs of the production.

variable shadow setting…for instance if you need the shadow for a spotlight making the basic shadow component for an area light…or raytrace shadows…or physical light shadows.

also I like the physical light shader that mental ray has for all its lights….just connect that shader and wham you have a nice soft panel of illumination…

maya area lights are fast but really unpredictable…

but what I would like the most is a mantra primer.

case studies on how to make mantra act like the renderers in which its competition…i.e. vray, mental ray, prman…not just for illumination but also for complex shader generation.

like tutorials and HDAs that show us how to emulate what we are accustomed to in other packages.

thanks!

any chance we can get something like the for mantra….and vector operations focused on mantra…so we could really use mantra in the same way people use mental ray and vray?

:roll:

I am really stunned by the quality of learning materials…but sometimes it would be great to get back to basics…

like a primer for the mantra renderer and insights on how it works and why.

from rendering basics , to optimization, to special applications, to emulation case studies(making mantra act like mental ray, vray, prman, etc.)

and then do the same with material exploration and development…

short movies showing use how to make different materials from basic to advanced….so we could show off some more…

that would be so cool…to understand mantra like I did back in 2.0 dayz :roll: ….or more….

it would also convince so many people to pick up houdini.

THANK YOU….that is really kind of you!!!!!!! :shock:

I am currently ranting on cgtalk about the maya software renderer…we receive large nurbs datasets and the maya software renderer simply sucks period….I hate it.

in fact the thread was called “if maya 2009 isnt a great upgrade I want a divorce”

and all I could think about was (YES)

I want to use houdini for the stuff that I do.

but I have to be able to prove mantra wont give me memory leaks(the main problem with maya software renderer)

also…I want area lights that work. as expected.

and the ease of use that one find in the render settings dialog box and hypershade.

I am glad to see other product/industrial designers begin to consider houdini.

lets all keep in touch.

adekoye adams

can we have a three and four legged version too?

I too was completely BLOWN away by the delayed load feature in mantra…

But the problem is its accessibility….like houdini can do EVERYTHING vue can do…but vue has the spectral renderer hooked up instantly to a sun source…and its volumetric clouds and super easy to make.

its instancing and ecosystem functions are also super easy….BUT

its comes at a HUGE sacrifice…

CONTROL….its a real pain in the butt to control it….

but in the right hands its a good tool….esp. for matte painters….

I wish it was that easy to set houdini up like that….OR to have great docs. for mantra.

LIKE:

user guide showing us how to setup everything we know how to do in other softwares….

like mental ray

like vue…

and a doc DEVOTED to optimization…

I think that sidefx will do it soon though…that company rocks.

thats a shame because vue has a nice, but SLOW renderer…its kinda the direct opposite of mantra….super easy to set up….but ineffecient yet hard to fine tune…

especially with the spectral atmosphere settings…and the noise generator for materials….Something I would love to learn how to do in mantra….

the only thing is that you simply get to a point where you get super stuck on optimizing a render….like a scene with clouds and shiz can easily go over an hour for the frame.

but I think it could be done in houdini…its just the new focus needs to be in mantra/vex “mimicking” what we see in other renderers….