I'm rather new to Houdini, but I have several years of programming experience and about 2 years with Blender. I found the most difficult part of learning Blender (compared to learning programming) is that most tutorials are video-based.

Most video tutorials suck. They are often too fast or too slow. They might use different shortcut settings. They don't tell you the name of the function they're using, and even if they do, you can't copy and paste it to google. And if I missed a part it's hard to rewind to the exact point where I missed it. When they're outdated the authors have no easy way to update them.

I'd rather not go through all of these again for Houdini. Are there some quality text(and image)-based tutorials? I've only found https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniTutorials [www.tokeru.com] so far, is this a good start?

Hey Raincole,
Most of the tutorials are in videos format as well, mostly because there is a lot of things going on and writing everything is very long to do.
I'm currently learning Solaris and it is text-based (https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/tutorial_1.html) Having a lengthy line to tell you where to connect a node to another is quickly annoying in my opinion.
I wrote documentation for our company and updating text can be as long as re-recording a video.
I think that what would be really cool is to have chapter and term search inside video (maybe with speech to text this thing will come?)
I'm not related to SideFX at all, but I think that for now there is no good solution to me

All the foundation tutorials have PDF documents with text-based lessons - some are also accompanied by videos for reference:

https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/houdini-foundations/ [www.sidefx.com]

These are designed for getting started with Houdini and the PDFs have been updated for H19

raincole
I've only found https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniTutorials [www.tokeru.com] so far, is this a good start?

I think it's a great start, but I'm biased.

As the others have pointed out sidefx have always tried to write text docs. The quality can be up and down (huge swathes of the older dops nodes are just the same boilerplate text and can be frustrating), but the newer stuff is often very good, like the karma docs, kinefx docs, solaris docs.

I prefer text docs too, its a big part of why I write the wiki, but I know I'm in the minority. Google at least indexes youtube pretty well now, the auto generated captions can be searched and often link you directly to the time offset you need for the question you have, which is pretty amazing.

There's a few good text resources around though:

https://www.toadstorm.com/blog/ [www.toadstorm.com]
https://www.katexagoraris.com/more-fx-help [www.katexagoraris.com]
https://lex.ikoon.cz/blog/ [lex.ikoon.cz]
https://shadesoforange.de/blog/ [shadesoforange.de]
https://jakerice.design/blog/

There were two books on houdini, both out of print. 'Houdini on the spot' was pretty good, but I fear a lot of its tips might be a little old now. There's some japanese ones that are more recent, but depends how good your japanese is...

rmagee
All the foundation tutorials have PDF documents with text-based lessons - some are also accompanied by videos for reference:

https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/houdini-foundations/ [www.sidefx.com]

These are designed for getting started with Houdini and the PDFs have been updated for H19

mestela
As the others have pointed out sidefx have always tried to write text docs. The quality can be up and down (huge swathes of the older dops nodes are just the same boilerplate text and can be frustrating), but the newer stuff is often very good, like the karma docs, kinefx docs, solaris docs.

Thank you two very much. I've started reading the official guides and planning to study CGWiki after.

mestela

When I briefly worked with Sidefx to create documentation, we made a special effort to create text-based docs, precisely because updating video docs is just impossible. Amongst them:

• https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/tutorial-lighting-1.html [www.sidefx.com] - LOPs lighting - Probably needs a good update
  
• https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/destruction/tutorials/intro_to_mbd_1.html [www.sidefx.com] - Guided RBD tutorial
  
• https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/tutorials.html [www.sidefx.com] - LOPs intro
  

mrCatfish
When I briefly worked with Sidefx to create documentation, we made a special effort to create text-based docs, precisely because updating video docs is just impossible. Amongst them:

• https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/tutorial-lighting-1.html [www.sidefx.com] - LOPs lighting - Probably needs a good update
  
• https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/destruction/tutorials/intro_to_mbd_1.html [www.sidefx.com] - Guided RBD tutorial
  
• https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/tutorials.html [www.sidefx.com] - LOPs intro
  

I appreciate your effort a lot! I think https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/destruction/tutorials/intro_to_mbd_1.html [www.sidefx.com] is a good example.

- A very short video to show the final result.
- Brief text explanation.
- An example .hip file.

CGWiki is mostly like that and that's why it's so helpful. I hope more official docs are like that.

On the contrary, I found the official KineFx docs lack hips. And I'm struggling with it.