im getting old!|

[super gnu]

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.

[AlexP]

Yeah would agree to an extent, I can see the appeal as it provides the open workings to anybody who has the brains to manipulate them. But it makes life difficult for the rest of us!

[Morbid Angel]

I have a problem with this too. You are either an artist, or a programmer. Rarely you can be both. Those who are artists (I consider my self that) do learn a bit of programming but they can never be compared to real programmers, and vise-versa. But as and artist you have to hold in your head not one software, but at least 3-5 different softwares, which have their own inner workings, inner languages, problems, work arounds etc. On top of that you are expected to handle the coding part too? It just gets exponentially difficult. I think its a matter of what you choose as your best skill and stick with it. I realized that I can probably never learn houdini, it probably won't be beneficial for things I do. I know people who work in houdini for years and still don't feel 100% comfortable in it.

If I'm being asked to do something that's definitely outside of my skill range, I'd simply say no. At the same time, the industry and technology is ever evolving, and always moving forward. So its partly why I chose the rendering side, and stay as close to that as possible, I feel comfortable there and can predict that no technological revolution is going to throw me off this wagon.