Hi folks,

I just started learning Houdini, like…. today. However, I'm definitely not new to 3d apps and I consider myself quite Maya savvy, and working with node-based apps feels very natural to me.

Anyway, I'm starting a project that I need to get done pretty soon. It involves some big dominos falling/cascading through a park, and some leaves billowing up in the air as a result. Maybe some dust and other things too, but we'll see. Oh, and this is a live-action project. The dominos/effects/etc are CG, but the rest is shot in the plates. It's seems to me like a perfect Houdini-style project.

I only have 2 weeks for this project, plus maybe an extra week for tweaking the compositing/integration. Do you think it's unwise to jump into Houdini and try to do it in an application that's new to me, or would I be better off sticking with Maya, which would be more difficult?

And in either case, my main question is in regards to the live-action workflow. Do any of you have any workflow suggestions when working with live action shots? Any newbie how-to's, such as how to load the plates into Houdini and such?

Thanks!

As to jumping to a new pool of Houdini, it's your choice and risk! No one else can answer that question, honesty. I've done it once (LW->H.) and I don't regret… but this was me and my project. I took a risk and won .

As to good things, you have almost ready to use at least two examples with dominos:

- the one from Gnomom DVD by Craig Zerouni
- the one from Houdini hacker contest by Koen:
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=3370&hl=hacker%20contest&st=48 [forums.odforce.net]

cheers,
sy.

PS As to loading a footage: Parhaps the best way to do it is to use COPs. Load a sequence in COPs (FileCOP), go to 3d viewport, press ‘d’ on it, go to “Background Tab” and choose your COP operator. Done. As I remember PFTrack, Boujou and 3DEqualizer export to Houdini Hip file tracking data - if you bother about it also… good luck!

I would make a list of the things you definitely think would be inefficient with Maya and weigh your options.

My personal opinion is that Houdini can be made to be efficient at most things with the proper setups. It can also be terribly inefficient at most things with improper setups.

What tends to take the most time on any project is working out the inconsistencies and technical issues. Like most good things there's more initial setup and learning time with Houdini than your run-of-the-mill 3D app.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna stay away from Houdini for this one since I'm on such a time crunch. Gonna try to learn it properly first.

I do wanna use Boujou for it though. I know this might not be the place to look for Boujou help, but I'm having a hard time finding resources elsewhere.

I just did my first track with it, and the test object tracks to the ground perfectly, but when I export the camera it doesn't stick to the ground at all. It floats around really badly. Any suggestions as to what I might be missing? I don't see why it would fine in Boujou, but not Maya.

Ok, so as it turns out, it was a good track. (I retracked it with the moving parts of the frame masked out, but I dunno if I really needed to or not.)

The problem was just the location of the elements in my scene. If anyone else runs into the same problem, that would be a good thing to check. When you import the camera into your 3d app, use the locators in the boujou data group to make sure your objects are positioned properly in the scene. My objects were way too far from the camera, so I had to move them much closer and scale the boujou data group up to a more reasonable size. The default boujou export is way too tiny.

Thanks for the Boujou import tip Keith!

No problem.
8)

Just as an extra sidenote, that experience was with Maya. I would imagine it would be pretty similar with Houdini though.