Will Houdini 13 be release anytime soon (this year?) ?
H12 was release 1 year ago.

H12.0 last spring.
H12.1 last fall.
Do the rough math…

It's been an entire year?
H12.1 would have been at least a whole release of any other software package with the number of features that were crammed in to a .1 release and that's not counting the features that were introduced between those two major/minor releases and the feature creep in H12.1. With that math, we had two big releases last year.

Needsun, you do read the daily build release journals on the download page, right?

Needsun
Will Houdini 13 be release anytime soon (this year?) ?
H12 was release 1 year ago.

No date yet for H13 but this should keep you busy until then:

http://bit.ly/10S40FN [bit.ly]

Am I understanding this correctly?

Someone is actually defending how hard Houdini is to learn and use?

Usability vs power is a false choice. There are plenty of examples out there of software that's both useless and difficult. Conversely, there's powerful software that's extremely intuitive.

This is the thing that bugs me most about this forum and why I hardly ever post here. A lot of times, whenever someone brings up the uncomfortable yet elephantine fact that Houdini has a steep learning curve and a pisspoor 3d interaction/visualization model, at least one of the old school power users tells the noob “go away, and don't come back until your beard is as long and as white as mine.”

Don't do that. You're not helping.

stjohn
Am I understanding this correctly?

Someone is actually defending how hard Houdini is to learn and use?

And this refers to what?

SYmek

stjohn
Am I understanding this correctly?

Someone is actually defending how hard Houdini is to learn and use?

And this refers to what?

The latter half of page 2, I'm guessing.

I think it's perfectly valid for a new user to let it be known that they find the UI confusing. It doesn't make their opinion any less valid. It simply means that we haven't been doing our job properly. It's hard to grow a user base if a significant portion of curious users get scared or put off by things that shouldn't be scary or off-putting.

Ease-of-use is perfectly doable without sacrificing any inherent power. It just requires a bit of thought and elbow-grease.

SYmek

stjohn
Am I understanding this correctly?

Someone is actually defending how hard Houdini is to learn and use?

And this refers to what?

I'm not going to dig through this whole thread (and others) for examples for you. Somebody suggested that Houdini's UI be improved to the point where new users can more easily work towards making the most of the power available. Somebody then said it's fine the way it is and somebody else said they should go away and learn more before posting what they'd like to see in the UI and workflow.

That's garbage, and it happens on this forum all the time.

For all you new users out there, don't give up. Don't let these guys tell you what you want is wrong. When it comes to subjective topics like user experience, your voice is just as important as theirs.

That said, with regard to technical advice, you should listen, and listen well, because they know what they're talking about. But one does not necessarily invalidate the other.

Thank you Side Effects for speed up Houdini 12.5 and improvement in Alembic.
I really like improvement in mantra render time. Now it renders very fast.
But I'm still missing drag and drop feature to open .hip file in Houdini. I wish that it will be included in Houdini 13.

My biggest wish is a manual with fully working example scenes.
Most of the examples are not working with the actual program version,
or doing unexspected things…

Whith this broken scenes, learning is nearly impossible.

I'de like:

• More tutorials (made for begginers)
  More GPU accelerated taks for FX (water, destruction etc.)
  GPU accelration for both nvidia and AMD
  Best support for AMD
  More easy interface

matthias_k
My biggest wish is a manual with fully working example scenes.
Most of the examples are not working with the actual program version,
or doing unexspected things…

Whith this broken scenes, learning is nearly impossible.

We did a pass on most, if not all, the examples for the 12.5 release, to weed out the broken ones and either fix them, or remove them if they were too obsolete.

If you find any that are still busted, please feel free to log a bug for it.

In regards to drag and drop of hip file feature… how about drag and drop of external files in general into Houdini, with context sensitive results. So for example,

- if you drag a hip file into Houdini, you actually open it.
- if you drag an obj file into a scene, you get a geo obj node with a file node inside pointing to the obj file
- if you drag an obj file into a SOP network, you simply get a file node with the obj file referenced
- if you drag an image into a COP network, you get a file COP referencing such image
- if you drag an image into an object on the scene view, you get a SHOP material created with that image as the color map and attached to the model (ok that may be crazy )
- if you drag an image into a vex shader, you get a texture VOP with the image being referenced
- if you drag something that has no association, you get a pop up saying that “the file you dragged does not have an action associated with it, would you like to create one?”. If you click on the yes button, it opens a python/hscript interface to write a script to run when that type of file is dragged into Houdini (with convenient methods such as "hou.DragFile.getFilePath()). Once you write a script, this can be saved in a folder that can be specified in the Houdini.env so that it can be shared across a network drive for all users

A better way to “make” UVs.

Primitive VOP. That is VEX which allows to work also with other primitives than points. That assumes also primitive generation on VEX execution.

As an companion Mantra could have a procedural object doing the same at render time. As a consequence, FurSOP and Fur Procedural could be entirely expressed in generator code for starter. Feathers pipeline? Please welcome, veins? No problem.

Just wanted to get on the bandwagon for PySide dockable panels. It would do wonders for UI development.

If Houdini 13 had just one thing, it would be a major release:

Working, reliable, robust booleans.

OK I'm kidding, I also want PySide integrated. So, 2 features == Houdini 13 for me.

+1 for Primitive VOP. I also had the same idea but wasn't sure if it was feasible. I guess if it's too much, maybe a restricted Point Wrangle SOP style Primitive Wrangle SOP?

The AttribWrangle and AttribVOP SOPs are essentially point/prim/vert attribute manipulators.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.5/nodes/sop/attribwrangle [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.5/nodes/sop/attribvop [sidefx.com]

pbowmar
Working, reliable, robust booleans.

I know the battle that will ensue if I weigh in on this one, so I'll just contribute a limerick:

There once was a cookie in space,
Whose surface was quite the odd case.
For the union, it gave
The correct parts to save,
But the intersect looked more like lace.

:wink:

Awesome, I know you can fix it !