eikonoklastes

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.

@MJV Here is the official comparison: Compare | SideFX

It's an annual license. You pay upfront and you use the license for 12 months, all upgrades included. It does not renew (yet), you have to purchase a new license after it expires. There is no cancelling - once you buy it, it's yours for 1 year. There are two ways to license it - locally and online. If you do it locally, you have a fixed number of licenses you can install, after which you have to return one and reinstall it elsewhere. There is a limit on how many times you can return a license, after which you're stuck with the machine you installed on. They recently started a more flexible way, that uses an online server for the licensing, where you can sign in to any machine and up to two machines simultaneously. If you sign in on a third, one of the other machines will lose the license. There is no limit to how many times you can sign in and move your license around this way. Indie files are not usable on the pro (FX) version. You can open files from FX in Indie, but not vice-versa. You can't even copy nodes from Indie into FX. The FX session will downgrade to Indie if you attempt to do so.

Off to a great start. Keep 'em coming. Just a couple of comments from my side: - When SideFX do their demo videos, they usually use the default layout. This is to ensure that new users are not confused about where things are can follow along more easily without having to do an initial UI layout to match the demos. Houdini does have a Modeling UI preset, so maybe it's worth starting off with the default startup layout, and then switching to that layout so that new users have a path to where you reached. You can then proceed to further customise that layout by collapsing panels you don't want to see (like the timeline - not sure why that's visible in the modeling UI layout). - You mentioned about being careful with changing divisions upstream that will upset the selection groups. It would have been worthwhile to mention that the selection groups themselves can be procedural, which can allow you to change divisions, and still keep things working as expected downstream. Since this is a direct modeling tutorial, I guess that sort of setup is not necessary, but for newcomers it might be good-to-know information, since it does separate Houdini from the rest. That's it really. Looking forward to the next one!

Honestly, the actual features look pretty good. The UI, as always, looks very slick and modern, the Capsules, particularly look extremely promising as a long-term feature that will greatly extend C4D's capabilities. Both are extremely time-consuming features to implement, so I can see why, on an accelerated release schedule, you would only have a couple of these. Robust spline import is always a welcome feature, but hardly a major addition, but still, nice to have. I guess the major issue is why prioritise the freaking UI? That would have been likely last on my list of things to tweak with in C4D. It already had a very good UI, and given what an enormous task rehauling a major app's UI is, why on Earth expend resources in that direction? Anyhow, on a positive note, I am excited to see where Scene Nodes and Capsules are headed.

As next steps, you can use TOPs/PDG to generate a contact sheet of your variations for reviewing: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/pdg-for-design-work-pt-1-the-basics/ Side note: how the heck to like a post here? I'm, pretty sure I did it before, but I can't find the button any more.

Not just generate any number of pieces, but the real beauty is in the astonishing level of control it gives you to craft exactly the look you want over those pieces. It allows you to vary any parameter of any incoming geometry that you are looking to copy, and have extremely precise control over those variations. Also, if you need to target any specific piece or group of pieces for extra special attention, you can do that without having to break your chain, keeping everything procedural, always.

Looking good. Remember there's a Building Generator tool that ships with Labs, maybe dive into that to see what they're doing: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/building-generator/

You guys are absolutely rocking it. Really interesting stuff. Here's a quick, semi-random tip: If you're doing preview renders with Mantra, they have a really nice Click to Prioritize option, where if you hold down the left mouse button, it will focus the rendering only in that area. You can also enable Sticky Priority, so you can click to set the rendering area to focus on. Really handy way to quickly resolve areas of interest without having to wait for the whole frame to update. I wish all other renderers had this feature. Didn't realise my replies would get merged. Just adding this line for the topic separation. @Igor: Looking very cool. The nib looks a bit too flat. Does it have any thickness? You can try Labs Thicken to bulk it up.