Chris Wayles

Eh up Jerry,

Thanks for the reply; it's good to hear that individuals as well as the big shops are using it. I really hope that people take the effort to download it or track down the CD’s and give it a decent trial, like I mentioned it was a tool I really wanted to try for myself and with the apprentice scheme (which Side Effects must be applauded for) I’ve been totally blown away by scope of the thing.
I’m hoping to focus more on Character work in the near future so I shall be keeping a very close eye on the developments of ‘Escape’ (will this run the same character toolset as Master or be enhanced in any way, anybody know?).
My only concern's were whether the power could be exploited by someone who isn’t in a collaborative environment, but that will be where the community help springs into action like you say and if studios especially here in the UK would favour freelance work being done in M**a or XSI as it would be easier to drop into there production pipelines (but then I suppose its up to the artist to create sh*t hot work and then its not an issue :wink.

Look at it a litle longer than a week though

LOL, oh I shall don't worry

Thanks again Jerry.
Later Gator
Chris

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?