Houdini 16.5 Sneak Peak

Robert.Magee

A preview of some of the amazing new tools in Houdini 16.5 such as motion path editing, crowd banking, partial rag dolls, polyreduce, uvlayout, rounded edge rendering, narrow band flip simulations, optical flow, gamepad camera, terrain transplanting and so much more.

The planned released date for Houdini 16.5 is November 7, 2017.

kio

nice additions all around - curious to toy around with it!

Blond

Lol a 6 minute ''sneak peek'' video...
Well, alot of these features seems nice but they seem pretty basic to me. However I know that Houdini is mostly a node based special effects program and not a rigging/modelling/animation package...

Ryusaki

You are wrong Blond. Houdini can do complex rigging, modelling and animation even if it started as a pure VFX tool.
It seems to me that SideFx is after the Maya crowd, they slowly creep up from behind, ready for the kill.
It might take some time, but it will become a serious threat.

Axi5

Ryusaki said:

You are wrong Blond. Houdini can do complex rigging, modelling and animation even if it started as a pure VFX tool.
It seems to me that SideFx is after the Maya crowd, they slowly creep up from behind, ready for the kill.
It might take some time, but it will become a serious threat.

Agreed and it's starting to win me over. They need to flesh out their pie menus if they want to compete for speed though. They have been doing that though so I'm getting really interested. Also their landscape tools are pretty much the best on the market right now.

Zack Maxwell

Considering the complexity of the program, they still have a way to go on the training materials. They've been working hard on it, though.

Right now tutorials on procedural rigging and procedural UV mapping basically don't exist. But they are supposed to be releasing a set of rigging tutorials next month.

swann

Grimwolf said:

... But they are supposed to be releasing a set of rigging tutorials next month.

Where they said so? I have seen that they are in planing stage for tutorial series, nothing about next month.

Last tutorial masterclass about their autorigs was in the making for about 6 months. That's one video only. Now they talk about whole series, which is in planing stages, so still far and away from recording. So I think at best, around 6 months from now you can see first parts of this, 12+ months from now the end of it.

Zack Maxwell

Ah Christ, you're right. I was thinking of a tutorial from someone else that I was waiting on.
I'll have to just give up on rigging in Houdini for the time being.

PollySong

Every time I see something about Houdini I want to switch to it, but when I try it out I miss Modo's modeling tools. Any word on if the modeling tools in Houdini will get some love in the near future?

Zack Maxwell

I think for some time it will still be better to pair it with a traditional modeling program.

I hope it can take over that space eventually, though. SideFX is an amazing company. Practically the Allegorithmic of 3D.

Incredible support staff, actual indie licensing with full features and good pricing, rapid development, first-party tutorial support, extensive documentation, etc.

I'm sure everyone is aware of the issues with Autodesk.

The Foundry are essentially the same but with less funding.

And Blender is aggressive about keeping their software a Walled Garden that does everything on its own, with unique approaches to everything which disregard pipelines. Not to mention the extremely slow development due to it being free.

Aabel

The modeling tools are being actively developed and improved in every release. The tools are very feature rich and functional, the thing that hurts the most is working in the viewport is sort of a new workflow in Houdini hah.

 That said this looks like yet another great release, really looking forward to it!

Octo

I think Houdini is good for modeling that doesn't require a very controlled topology.
For that type of modeling, what hurts Houdini rather than help it is that every action creates a node.
Just redirecting an edge or cleaning up topology ends up being a huge node tree..and while that technically isn't an issue, it feels messy.
It also lacks some basic tools. There's not really even a "connect" tool...while "edge divide" is close, you'll have to go with the polysplit tool, which I always disliked compared to a more direct "connect" like feature.
One way to solve this would be to have one node for this type of modeling, much like the Topology node, where you can connect, remove, split, fuse and all that within it.

Axi5

Octo said:

I think Houdini is good for modeling that doesn't require a very controlled topology.
For that type of modeling, what hurts Houdini rather than help it is that every action creates a node.
Just redirecting an edge or cleaning up topology ends up being a huge node tree..and while that technically isn't an issue, it feels messy.
It also lacks some basic tools. There's not really even a "connect" tool...while "edge divide" is close, you'll have to go with the polysplit tool, which I always disliked compared to a more direct "connect" like feature.
One way to solve this would be to have one node for this type of modeling, much like the Topology node, where you can connect, remove, split, fuse and all that within it.

This is what the poly Edit node does. I actually like that Houdini auto creates nodes for me while I'm modeling in the viewport. It's much more interactive than Maya's history that's for sure.

Octo

The edit node only allows you to move points around, not change the topology.

Aabel

Octo said:

One way to solve this would be to have one node for this type of modeling, much like the Topology node, where you can connect, remove, split, fuse and all that within it.

You can do that with Topobuild already.

Justo

I'm really intrigued by that new decimator that tries preserving UVs; with or without quads. Can't think of another tool like that from other apps at the moment hmm..

razin

Justo said:

I'm really intrigued by that new decimator that tries preserving UVs; with or without quads. Can't think of another tool like that from other apps at the moment hmm..

We have a decimate modifier in blender who preserv the UVs, and modeling on a mesh who already have a uv layout preserv also the uv layout, i think other 3d package got that too

Sqwert

Only discovered Houdini a couple of days ago by chance watching an Epic Twitch stream.
Download the apprentice version as soon as the presentation ended, watch some 16 hours of tutorials since then to understand the workflow.
The most impressive feature IMO is the ability to create procedural game assets in the engine with HDA's. Just such a time saver, especially as a one man band developer such as myself.

Bigg__D

I cant see anything better than Max for modeling (my opinion). As far as rigging and animation of course Maya is very powerful in this department no wonder its used so much. But Houdini...what can I say its such a beautiful software that I wish got more love and exposure because it is the most powerful overall in terms of all the FX and node-based procedural system it is based on. If I were interested in animation then I see no reason not to learn Houdini and if you take a look at their pricing options it is retarded how awesome it is and yet people still not aware. I understand it may have a steep learning curve and the modeling tools are not quite the best but Maya is not exactly the greatest here either just look at Mayas interface its crazy as hell

thomasp

Justo said:

I'm really intrigued by that new decimator that tries preserving UVs; with or without quads. Can't think of another tool like that from other apps at the moment hmm..

mesh -> reduce in maya seems pretty good for that.

oglu

the maya reducer is the one from xsi... so xsi was able todo the same 8 years ago...

Odow

that retopo *_*