pezetko
… And ICE tree is just single Operator (like AttributeVOP)….

conceptually it may feel analogous, however ICE is bigger beast than that. In VOP/VEX operator you can either do multithreaded operations over points/prims/vertices/numbers or singlethreaded operation (detail)
in ICE you can mix and match them as many as you want so in single operator you can do some parallel operations on your point attribute array, then get min/max, normalize, use that to build new topology object, then change that topology few times, use it as lookup for other operations (in VOPs it would need to be different VOP networks/wrangles), simply it feels like large part of SOPs/VOP funcionality in the same network type, which can be much more powerful than SOPs/VOPs combo, but at the same time can be more messy and simply different but it can be built to feel like SOPs if needed. The truth is as well, that it's not so easy to make it communicate with other ICE operators, but that is more like a specific ICE issue than an architecture problem

and those brains behind ICE now have made FABRIC. some new thoughts added to ICE experiment. delivering processes to GPU, automatic and custom multi threading capabilities, a lot of good stuffs going on there. somehow a complete object oriented programing analogous to C++ inside 3d app. i think we should look forward to compare this new technology vs houdini paradigm henceforth.

I hope people are using Fabric now before saying that it is the competitor to Houdini. It's available for free ‘evaluation’.

it will not be a one to one fair comparison if we do compare fabric against whole houduni system. at least fabric will need about 3 decades of houdini development time to get assets that houdini currently has as its features. just think about how much time and effort SESI put for its FEM solver that fabric needs to put to write via its KL. houdini as a whole system, specially regarding SESI new trend for making its animation and modeling toolsets parallel to its VFX capabilities, is able for smashing not just fabric, rather many other tools in the market too.

but fabric as a development platform has some goodnesses, which i mentioned in previous post that we like to would have them in the VEX\CVEX context. then houdini will be ultimate unbeatable beast in the industry.

we get used to see any of other tools in the market in its highest functionality and capability as a feature in houdini.