Alexey Vanzhula

Modeler is a breath of fresh air for modelers
The main takeaway is that this tool completely changes how people perceive Houdini.

Traditionally, Houdini is seen as a complex, pure procedural software for simulations, where classic polygonal modeling is clunky and node-heavy out of the box.

Modeler is praised for bringing back the familiar, fast, and intuitive direct modeling workflow (similar to Modo, Silo, or Blender) while keeping all the power of the procedural engine under the hood.

Comparison with Modo
In the context of Modo's decline and eventual shutdown, Reddit users frequently mentioned Modeler as its spiritual successor. Artists note that the "fewer clicks, more action" philosophy and viewport responsiveness combined with Houdini actually run more stable and faster than the original Modo when handling heavy geometry.

The ideal tool for concept art and Hard Surface
Reddit users highly value Modeler for its speed in creating complex hard-surface shapes. Designers write that being able to quickly cut, stitch, and deform geometry with a pen or mouse without getting distracted by building complex node trees provides a massive boost to their project timelines.

Overall, this project is highly regarded as a unique, top-tier tool created by a solo developer who managed to fill a significant gap in the industry and prove that classic direct modeling in Houdini can be fast and comfortable. It is worth noting that SideFX is also actively developing modeling tools: the introduction of Topobuild, the new sculpting system, and now, in version 22, the viewport display of subdivision models with isolines—all of this plays a key role, significantly simplifying the workflow. It is precisely thanks to such comprehensive changes introduced by SideFX that modeling today has reached a qualitatively new level of power and has no equal.

Modeler 26 on Gumroad [alexeyvanzhula.gumroad.com]

Gaalvk
PolyBevel, Polyextrude, Subdivide—have serious, irreparable flaws.

1. Could you please provide more details on the specific difficulties you are experiencing when using these tools? If there truly are issues with polybevel, I don't quite understand what the problems are with polyextrude and subdivide.

2. Have you tried the Modeler 26 PolyPen?

raincole

alexeyvanzhula1984
About the “unsuitability” of Apple Silicon for Houdini and 3D: myths vs. real-world experience

1. Viewport (OpenGL vs Vulkan)
Right after the release of H21, there were indeed graphical bugs in the Vulkan viewport, and the good old OpenGL seemed more stable and faster, so I used it myself and advised others to do the same. But recently I tested Vulkan on one of the latest builds — all display bugs (like highlighting selected edges) have completely disappeared, and the viewport itself became maximally responsive and smooth.
As for the limitations in the SOP context, perhaps only the Texture Mask Paint tool really doesn't work on macOS. I haven't encountered any other limitations during my entire time working with it.

2. How a $700 box “bent over” a $4000+ setup
And now the most interesting part — why I completely moved my development to Apple.
Initially, I got a base Mac mini M4 just as a TV box. I had no thoughts of running heavy software there. But just out of curiosity, I installed Houdini on it. My main workstation at that time was a desktop PC with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (128 GB RAM) + RTX 4080 Super. A setup costing over 4 thousand dollars.
I couldn't believe my eyes and re-checked the tests several times. This little box performed incredibly cool in CPU-oriented tasks. The “phone” ARM architecture digests algorithms and OpenCL computations much more efficiently than heavy x86 hardware. The only area where the Mac mini predictably felt weak was viewport.

3. Bottom line
After this test, my life was never the same. I went out and bought a top-tier MacBook Pro with M4 Max with 128Gb unified memory — and I'm happy to this day. The same goes for working in modern Blender: it feels like you're sitting not at a laptop, but at an expensive Threadripper computer with 512 GB RAM.
It's great that Houdini 22 brought its own improvements for Apple. But personally, no one will ever be able to tell me again that Houdini or 3D runs poorly on Apple Silicon. The fairy tales that Mac is “not suitable for graphics” are a thing of the past.

4. Everything I wrote does not apply to the Karma renderer since I don't use it. But of course, I would dream of seeing a Metal backend for Apple. However, I am a realist and understand why this won't happen. Apple is a closed ecosystem, and it is not in their interest to work on Vulkan support. And support from SideFX for both Vulkan and Metal is a very difficult task, since the architectures are very different, and making some kind of universal layer for both Metal and Vulkan is impractical.

Can you not running your reply through LLMs? You've been in this community for quite a while. Everyone has been okay with your text. No need AI to write for you.

I constantly use Gemini for translation since I am not a native speaker. The fact that it automatically breaks text into groups is its own feature, but I am not asking it to improve the text.

I think if you wanted to get your point across to a Russian speaker, you would have used an LLM instead of Google Translate.

So I don't understand what the problem is at all. Is it that I translate even though I can write in English myself? Well, it's just faster; why should I spend three hours writing a long message and wasting time on its translation when I can spend it on something more useful. And I always number the replies in order.


I don't improve the text, and I don't do vibe coding.

But I partially agree, so in the future, I will ask not to change the text at all when translating.

This is a second, newer account. Actually, I have been on this forum since 2006.