manleystanley

Jason I agree, it's been my experiance the difficulty in use reflects the price. I'm realy not sure of why, but the more a CG program costs the more difficult it is to use. The first time I fired up Maya I was very intimidated by the interface. And pesonaly, when I'm working on a model I don't want to have to go to a sub menu of a sub menu to find the bevel. Of coarse with freeware you have the opposet, everything is right there and you see how little it does. :wink: If I buy a car as cheeply as possable I expect crank windows, standered transmition and no radio. But if I'm paying big bucks for a car it had better have powerwindows, automatic, and a 6 speaker 120watt cd. It's probibly all in who the program is designed for casual users want ease in use, pros want high quality results. So developers design their programs for their target consumer.
The thing is most casual users don't want to take the time to learn how to use a program. Something I read in the CG forums quite a bit is people post something to the effect of “I've been using this program for two weeks and I just can't get those results, what's the secret?”. And no I pop on there and say “spending 6 more weeks learning how to use the program”. It seems there a quite a few casual users out there that want a CG program that they can open, select a model, select a scene, sellect a pose then hit render, and expect a cinima quality render to come out.
ahhhh….aaahhhh…. ahhhh.. ch.po$er.. Sorry I have a cold.

At first I had no intention of replying, but after read through. I have to thank wolfwood for getting my point.
As I said I do this for “Hobyists” it's quite clear that Houdini was not designed for hobbyists. I do CG because I enjoy doing CG, it's not my goal to work for a production studio.
TheUsualAlex you're right when you said “It's probably not suited for you”. Houdini isn't; in my opinion, designed for the casual user. Much like a formual1 racer isn't designed for the casual driver :wink:

Lets see so far I have used the Houdini uninstall, then windows add/remove, then Ccleaner, then wolfwood's instructions. Then this AM I found the files your talking about. The reason I keep reffering to Wildtangent is because it's the only other program I have had an equivelant amount of problems cleaning out. This in it's self puts Houdini in my “can't recommend it” category. And I wont even mention the learning curve; which would be better described as a shear cliff. :wink:
Now, I'm done with this. My evalution is complete, and my review written.
“The only thing that exceeds Houdini's power is it difficulty in use. The amount of effort involved in getting a render of ”wip“ quality puts it deep in the ”work“ catigory, as there is no fun to it, I don't ever see the term ”ease of use“ being applide to it. But the real fun starts when you try to uninstall it. Which the difficulty of is equivelent to the difficulty of using it”. Don't be too insulted I write these for hobbyists, not pros.
Carrara5 is still my top pick for recommendation to hobbyists.
I will say for the most part the community here is quite nice, and has been most helpful. But as far as the program it's self, Side effects would have to pay me to use it.