eikonoklastes

I saw the below image in this C4D post, and found it to be an interesting exercise.

A parameter that references a node will usually have a button that will take you to that node's parameters. If you're talking about a channel reference, then you can visualise the link by enabling an option:

Quick note on this. Prims do have a position attribute. It's just hidden and it's read only. You can absolutely get the position of a prim in a Primitive VOP from the P output, or in a Primitive Wrangle by querying @P. You can only set position on points, which is why the displacement doesn't work when running over Primitives.

I think my tone got lost over the interwebz. When I said I definitely will not be stealing those tools for my benefit, I meant I definitely will be stealing them. They look too useful to not at least play with to see the potential usage. Now I'm off to hunt for some warez sites to a find a working Blender crack.

Not sure what this thread has morphed into, but as a Houdini user it has definitely piqued my interest into looking at Blender to um...inspire myself with these tools. Definitely not steal.

Digging into the memory archives here because it's been a while, but I always liked the ability in the Object Manager to set any sub-hierarchy as the root. It helped a lot with scene management. It had a handy shortcut as well (Ctrl+Alt+click or something).

Yes, pretty much all other DCCs have this. I think 3ds Max and C4D were the last ones to finally get it. Houdini and Softimage XSI (RIP) have had this since pretty much forever. Maya added theirs in the mid-2000s.

I did use a pretty standard example there. Below is a better example. In that, I'm using a noise map to drive the inset amount per face. Houdini's Extrude tool allows you to optionally remove the front faces post-extrude, so you get the holes for free. To drive the point further, once you have a per-element attribute, you can do pretty much what you want with it - obvious candidates are per-face colour, scale, rotate, extrudes, etc., but you can also use it to drive density if you want to scatter some objects on there, or if you're simming, drive per-face friction, bounce, mass, etc. You can also exploit the attributes for very precise selections, so you can group all faces that have a value of < 0.5 say, and then do a subdivide (for example) on only those. The sky's the limit really.

Good to see how Blender handles this. This kind of per-point attribute system is pretty much at the core of Houdini, and as a result it is pervasive across the app. Houdini also extends this to faces, where per-face attributes can be used in interesting ways.

Houdini does have a vastly expanded toolset compared to C4D, especially in the sim department, but the thing that drew me away from C4D and into Houdini was precisely replicating what I was doing in C4D. Specifically, I was tasked with creating a procedural pattern generator for the fascia of a building (video below). I was getting decent results out of Cinema 4D, but started running into some hard walls when I attempted to scale up. Processing times started ballooning, and I started needing to frequently break the chain to get a flattened version of the geometry, that resulted in bloated scene file sizes and slow saving. I was actually ok just continuing the way I was, but I had some downtime, and curiosity caused me to see if there were better ways to do what I was doing. I can't remember how I landed on Houdini specifically, but hoo boy, am I glad I did! Despite knowing nothing about Houdini, I was able to replicate that setup in about a week, and it performed an order of magnitude better than C4D. I was able to see changes to parameters almost instantly, even with absurdly scaled up scenes, I'm talking levels I would not have even attempted a tenth of which in C4D. I was able to keep things entirely procedural from start to finish with no compromises, and the scene file size never exceeded 3-4 MB, even when I was generating over 2 million polygons. That was the turning point that convinced me to invest more time and effort into Houdini, and I won't lie - there was pain. But it always paid off with a better way to work. The good news is that there will be far less pain for new users today because Houdini has become significantly easier to use, and there is also massively more beginner learning content available today compared to when I started. TL;DR I think reproducing C4D techniques in Houdini is totally worth it because it performs better and offers more flexibility.

A Time Shift in a For Loop is, unfortunately, the easiest way. The other way is to use CHOPs*, but that is significantly more complicated. CHOPs does give you some very nice features in return, with advanced damping and smoothing, and non-linear staggering, to name a couple. The 3rd way might be with KineFX, which is the recently introduced procedural character rigging toolset, but I haven't explored that yet. * What the hell is CHOPs? Short for CHannel OPerators, it is a set of tools to create or manipulate animation curves, and allows you to do some extremely advanced curve editing and mixing. Think of it as a procedural animation editor.

Staggering animations in Houdini is unfortunately not straightforward. It's very doable, and gives you excellent control, but does require the application of a couple of advanced concepts. I have attached one way of doing this. There are others. houdini_zNsjtHRhVy.mp4

As someone who transitioned from C4D (used it for 10 years straight) to Houdini, I think what makes Houdini special is not it's myriad features, but its foundation — it religiously follows an open approach, and at any stage of your scene gives you complete control over everything, down to individual points. This is where the actual learning curve comes in — understanding the methods it employs to enable this unparalleled flexibility and control. That's where the secret sauce is, and that's what "clicks" into new users' heads when they're learning. The rest of the learning is standard UI/workflow stuff that applies to learning any new app, but cracking Houdini's core approach is the real moment of truth, and that approach is so damn good that almost everyone who learns it starts wishing that every app would behave like Houdini. By the way, all 3D concepts can be transferred. You don't need to upend your existing knowledge, you don't need to be a programmer, and you don't need to be a maths whiz.

Is this Houdini 19? I'm on 19.0.622. Might be a version conflict. If not, could probably ignore the warning.

@deckThe difficulty of nodes is highly overrated, in my opinion, but that's for another thread. Here are the source files, if anyone wants to have a look (the Houdini scene file will open in the free version). I have also exported an FBX and the texture map, that should work in any app. Cheers! https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!AA-AC2TSx5EAfxo&id=C73DC38E0B4C8E1C!424176&cid=C73DC38E0B4C8E1C

@Cairyn @deck Hello. I am not projecting geometry using UVs (although that should also be possible). I'm using a texture (which is just a simple grid) as a displacement map. Here's a walkthrough of the setup (also demonstrating one of my favourite aspects of Houdini - where it's very easy to follow the flow of data). But I digress. Hopefully the video helps.

Just to add to this, if you promote the parameters, you can animate them outside the VOP.

A more progressed version, rendered with Karma.

I've been following this excellent thread for a while now, but haven't had the opportunity to do it justice. I was able to get decent results using a fairly simple method. It basically involves creating a reference cone that is easy to UV map, and then transferring those UVs to the actual cone, modeled from the circular grid.

I'm not sure what's happening here because I didn't read your node graph, but it appears to be a colour-driven extrusion, along with a sphere to control the mask

Here's Houdini's take on a Sine curve: 1BVxZBJLxc.mp4 It's the same thing, as you'd expect, with a couple of extra nodes in there to build the UI.

I'm a bit confused about what this topic is actually about. If we're comparing what each app is capable of outputting, then that is not necessarily dependent on whether it uses nodes or not. In fact, nodes are not even a requirement for an app to be procedural. Nodes just carry data, and serve some specific purpose. For me, the main advantage of using nodes is scene-readability. I used to create procedural stuff in Cinema 4D, and when I'd open the same scene two weeks later, it'd take me ages to decipher what it was that I had actually done. C4D, prior to Scene Nodes, offered no visualisation of how your data was flowing. In Houdini, regardless of how complex a structure I have made, all I need to do is go through the nodes, top-to-bottom, and in 5 minutes I know exactly what it was that I did. There are other things to be said about node-based workflows, and if we're going to compare nodes between apps, I think we need to compare the implementation of these nodes and how easy the workflow is. XPresso was hands down the worst node UX for me. It was shockingly bad in how it required you to interact with it. Houdini, on the other hand, has by far the best workflow for nodes I've ever used. The UX for it is sublime, just packed to the gills with endless little helpful usability features that make things easier for the user. I haven't tried Blender, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't much closer to Houdini than Xpresso in usability. I've read some not-so-good things about C4D's SN workflow though, so that isn't inspiring too much confidence right now.

SideFX has never developed a C4D plugin for Houdini Engine. Their official list is 3ds max, Maya, Unreal Engine and Unity. They provide the API for other apps to roll their own. I remember there being a C4D plugin for H16, but I stopped tracking that for a while now.

You buy a new Indie license after the previous one expires, no limit to how many times you can re-up. Of course, if things take off, and you hopefully start rolling in it, you'll need to buy the FX license. HIP files are Houdini project files. LC is Limited Commercial (Indie). NC is Non-Commercial (Apprentice). HDA files are Houdini Digital Assets - what Capsules in C4D are aspiring to be. The main difference I guess is that HDAs can also be implemented in other apps via Houdini Engine. I don't think SideFX is interested in users upgrading from Indie to FX. They understand that those serve very different markets. What they want to avoid is large studios offshoring their work to Indie users and still having access to the output, which is why the limitation exists in that direction.

SideFX has dramatically improved the accessibility of the software in the last couple of releases, not just with the software itself, but also the availability of online learning material and resources. Unfortunately, a lot of the 3rd party material has not adapted to it quickly enough, and you'll still see them using scripting/coding to accomplish what can now be done with factory-shipped tools. When I joined at v17, pretty much every single scene of mine had some VEX in it (VEX being Houdini's in-built coding language). Now, I almost never have to use VEX. I'll still use it because I've learned it, and typing one or two lines of basic code can be quicker (for me) than dropping down a node and setting parameters on it, but my preferred approach is to only use it when absolutely necessary - and it hasn't been absolutely necessary in most common use-cases for a while now. Just a few minutes ago, a user on the Houdini Discord was struggling with a tutorial that was advising using VEX, when, in fact, the setup was exceedingly basic and could be sorted with just 3 in-built nodes, and zero coding. Now, having said all that, Houdini is not there yet in terms of absolute ease of use, certainly not in comparison with C4D. There is still a learning curve as it does a few things its own way, and some tools are just straight up for advanced users (like the fluid solver, for e.g.) Still, the pace at which SideFX is making these tools easier to use is astonishing, the community is growing, and the resources are expanding, so it's a great time to get on board and make some cool sh...stuff.