A Question for Steven, Jason and all the other professional users.
Can a one man outfit get the most out of Houdini ( given that there arent that many tutorials and the Houdini community is still quite young) or is it more of a team/production tool? where people can exchange ideas and explore/experiment what this package has to offer in a group.
Ive had the apprentice package this last week and the one thing that strikes me apart from the sheer power of the thing is the overall depth of it, I love the procedural concept (which makes perfect sense for professional users where briefs/designs change hourly), and ive got it straight in my head how the different OP's work together (well sort of), but the technical/expressions/programming side leaves me a bit cold, it doesn't come across as an artists tool, even the terminology when procedures are being explained in forums can be daunting, “take your xSOP and feed it into the input of yPOP then add a zSHOP”.
Im a Max user since v.1 and for the most part ive managed to do most things with it (and a huge collection of plugins), but ive always wanted to see what the high end apps had to offer in particular Softimage, Houdini and Mirai. Mirai, I never got to play with (perhaps I never will, though ive recently being playing with the free Wings 3D modeller, which is really good fun to use and what I consider an artists tool). Ive explored the XSI demo and found it to be a very powerfull app, well I thought it was till I started using Houdini, man the scope of this thing is huge.
What Im asking in my roundabout rambling way is, do you consider something like ‘Select’ or ‘Escape’ (sorry ‘Master’ is too expensive) a viable alternative to the current crop of 3D apps for a person using it in isolation? Any freelancers out there?
Chris
Are there any official figures for the Houdini user base?