Anobody attempted Archviz in Houdini?

[Morne]

Well the crazy question is in the title. I can't help it, I'm curious

[glorybound]

They have a pretty impressive video on their home page. $695 for SketchUp Pro!

[Morne]

Houdini can do a bunch of things that Sketchup can never even dream of.

[glorybound]

Never tried it.

Bobby Parker www.bobby-parker.com

[Morne]

So it's possible:
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/2207...visualisation/

[Morne]

$199 per year to SideFX for Houdini Indie sounds a lot better than $1450 per year to Autodesk for Max

Now if only I can get my hands on a VRay for Houdini beta and try out an old project...

[jacksc02]

If Itoosoft developed forestpack and railclone for Houdini then a lot of people would make the switch.

[Mokiki]

I highly doubt people would make the switch to houdini for archviz for that reason. First of all with the tools already available inside Houdini users can already build railclone and forest pack like systems. Sure the people who'd do the archviz probably won't be able to reproduce an Houdini Asset like this, but its possible.

Additional in the end doing all the archviz stuff in houdini seems like more work in general. Sure again you can build highly customizeable Assets for certain tasks but will it really save that much work?

[super gnu]

yeah ive played around with Houdini. for modelling work Max is much faster and nicer to use. houdini however, can literally do *anything* - as long as you know how to use it. unfortunately for me, that involves a really profound understanding of the mathematics behind what you wish to achieve. if you have those skills, it really does not need plugins. although, maybe vray would be nice


bear in mind also that the "indie" price comes with some fairly solid limitations on usage. if you want the full fat version it rapidly becomes more expensive than max ( minus plugins of course)


for me the best thing about houdini (apart from its amazing depth) is: its not autodesk.

[Moriah]

yeah ive played around with Houdini. for modelling work Max is much faster and nicer to use. houdini however, can literally do *anything* - as long as you know how to use it. unfortunately for me, that involves a really profound understanding of the mathematics behind what you wish to achieve. if you have those skills, it really does not need plugins. although, maybe vray would be nice


bear in mind also that the "indie" price comes with some fairly solid limitations on usage. if you want the full fat version it rapidly becomes more expensive than max ( minus plugins of course)


for me the best thing about houdini (apart from its amazing depth) is: its not autodesk.

If they upgraded Houdini's modelling tools and be more user friendly, combined with their powerful node system, it would put 3dsmax stack modifier to shame... I asked a coworker if he could model something basic in houdini while i was watching and ye... it's slow, but very powerful... Just the fact that you can turn your entire mesh to voxels and do boolean operations, then convert back to mesh is really powerful... But doing a simple bevel and having some control with it it's a pain for example.

Also it doesn't necessarily need stuff like forest pack, some people are already doing powerful scatter tools with houdini and are free... Of course FP is way more complex than a simple scatter, but i think most of it can be done with native Houdini.

[SreckoM]

Yeah there is no single need for FP in Houdini. You can build everything in Houdini, plus if you render in Mantra you can use Packed primitives which is super amazing thing.

Mantra is capable of rendering archviz stuff, it i path trace rendering, similar to Arnold. It is crazy what you can pipe into render, every single attribute you have on mesh ... On interiors it is also like Arnold, slow.

About modeling, honestly it is great for archviz type of modeling. Where modeling toolset is not really usable are organic stuff, which 99% modelers are doing in Zbrush anyway. But they are investing a lot in modeling tools, look latest 15.5 release.

BTW any news on Vray Beta for Houdini?