is it me or is the trend to make everything node-based and made of tiny building blocks, powerful, but rather too complex for a simple artist like me?
houdini at least has the shelf tools, which are higher level, going beyond those is like walking off a cliff though.
MCG, stoke, krakatoa, thinking particles and -particularly- pflow box 3, basically require you to understand vector maths and be more of a programmer than an artist. seems this approach is the favoured one now.
i guess its easier to provide a handful of maths operators and say "go crazy" than to provide many specialised higher-level nodes. the original pflow is about where my level is for node-based stuff. but after box 2 they just went mental with box 3, and stopped making any high-level stuff. now if you want to achieve a given effect, the answer is always, "yes you can do it in box3" which is cool and all, but , -you just need to learn vector maths and well, basically, programming.
i understand the power of these new tools, but man i prefer something like forestpack. powerful, seems to do everything i can think of, and there is a button with the right name there somewhere.. no maths needed.
i guess ive been doing 3d for 20 years, and i grew up clicking through rollouts and menus. its like comfy slippers. dont feel any particular desire to go back to school to study maths just to use the new generation of plugins. a step back in user friendliness for the more basic (relatively speaking.. im not a vfx TD) stuff i need, imho.
houdini at least has the shelf tools, which are higher level, going beyond those is like walking off a cliff though.
MCG, stoke, krakatoa, thinking particles and -particularly- pflow box 3, basically require you to understand vector maths and be more of a programmer than an artist. seems this approach is the favoured one now.
i guess its easier to provide a handful of maths operators and say "go crazy" than to provide many specialised higher-level nodes. the original pflow is about where my level is for node-based stuff. but after box 2 they just went mental with box 3, and stopped making any high-level stuff. now if you want to achieve a given effect, the answer is always, "yes you can do it in box3" which is cool and all, but , -you just need to learn vector maths and well, basically, programming.
i understand the power of these new tools, but man i prefer something like forestpack. powerful, seems to do everything i can think of, and there is a button with the right name there somewhere.. no maths needed.
i guess ive been doing 3d for 20 years, and i grew up clicking through rollouts and menus. its like comfy slippers. dont feel any particular desire to go back to school to study maths just to use the new generation of plugins. a step back in user friendliness for the more basic (relatively speaking.. im not a vfx TD) stuff i need, imho.
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