Marc Schmitt

1.

My biggest wish is a tiltable (right now you can only shift it) camera backplate with live preview in the viewport.

For architectural projects this would make things so much more streamlined and creative. Especially when you're trying to put models into already distorted backgrounds, this could speed up the whole process by far.


2.

More (and robust) support of CAD formats for import.

Right now I have to rely on several 3rd party tools for conversion. This is just cumbersome and error prone.


3.

An option to switch the animation editor into a speed/acceleration mode.

Right now the editing is all value based. So, when editing value changes over time you're stuck with using the bezier handles or adding more keyframes which can get quite cumbersome, as well.

In my opinion this is a huge minus. As much as I dislike after effects, it's one of its bigger strengths for motion graphics, imho.

Imho, your mockups are highly eye pleasing and I personally would love to give these changes a try in actual projects.

If I had to choose, I would vote for UX improvements and tidying up the interface, improving the layout of the parameter pane and things like that, first.

But I can totally see the potential for greater acceptance by new users and designers (aka humans that are distracted by mediocre looks) if the UI could be a bit sexier and less inconsistent. For me, a broader set of curated (!) color schemes sound like a first start in this direction.

To please everybody, houdini should have a skinnable UI with different (easily customizable) presets. With presets like classic, minimalistic, sci-fi and what not. The actual implementation should be platform agnostic, of course. The question is, how much time/resources sesi can/wants to spend. This task is not an easy one, imho.

Of course there're downsides with changes in UI as well: screenshots in the documentation, tutorials, books and other media wouldn't match with the actual look of the interface anymore and need to be updated (expensive) or would remain old. So, new users could actually struggle diving inside houdini with this kind of mismatch. But, wasn't attracting new users one of my stronger arguments for changing the UI, in the first place ..?

The more I think about it, I can understand, why sesi didn't rush working on UI changes since years.

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The new parameter pane looks sick..

Which one? I didn't catch any changes.