If I'd wanted to buy a Houdini Digital Asset for use with any supported plugin or application, I'd be to put it mildly, slightly put off by the general quality of the assets available and the “feel” of the site in general.

I believe asset sharing is a terrific idea and doing it commercially is no bad move either, but then you have to set some standards and implement some sort of lowest common denominator for quality of what is published.



Look at places like http://www.sketchfab.com [sketchfab.com] for example.
A whole different experience that actually makes you want to buy something.

Or go to Turbosquid http://www.turbosquid.com/index.cfm [turbosquid.com] and have a look around. :shock:

These are the places I'd go shopping. But there are no integration with Houdini Assets for these resources.

Now that the Indie versions of both Houdini and the Engine is going good, isn't it time to pay some attention to the asset exchange possibilities? The mentioned sites all integrate via plugins with the same applications that the Houdini Engine is planned for, like 3ds Max and Cinema4D in addition to Maya etc.

orbolt isnt a store to buy 3D Models.. You can't compare it with the ones you named. There are some great Assets there that can shorten some tasks. Not sure what you are looking for.

I've spoken to some of the people behind Sketchfab and they where very interested in the idea of having Houdini assets for sale on their site. Now with the Houdini Engine expanding to more and more applications, it seems like a good time to start planning some sort of integration.

A web based asset viewer and the Sketchfab Python api should be enough to get a ball rolling. Does it exist any open source code for the viewer system used with Orbolt? I presume it uses some web service to integrate the Orbolt asset view inside a Houdini panel… :?:

I agree that the Orbolt website is kind of clunky and old, kind of like this forum we are currently using. But I do like the idea that anyone can place their HDA on the website. If you don't want their crap, don't download it. Some of the HDAs are dated and don't seem to work with Houdini R14.

Blendswap and BlenderMarket are nice examples of good looking sites that offer assets for free or purchase. Blendswap also allows you to search by license type and ratings. The category of Staff Picks is great.

With Orbolt I get the feeling that a committee decided they needed a website to support the HDA concept and it was created then abandoned. There are no staff picks on Orbolt because there does not seem to be a staff running the website.

This is just my end-user impression and may not be the case, however.

http://www.blendswap.com [blendswap.com]

https://cgcookiemarkets.com/blender/ [cgcookiemarkets.com]

I think the biggest issue here, with the sites being compared, is a fundamental difference in what “asset” implies in the Houdini context.

If I need a model I could really care less about being able to browse from one or two places inside the package. I certainly don't want SESI devoting resources away from real work to injecting commerce into Houdini. If I want a model I'm fine browsing a website.

I don't have any love for the way the whole Orbolt thing works as it is far from bulletproof and it almost feels like a trap to trust anything purchased and locked into their DRM and mechanisms. That's already bitten me in the ass once after buying an asset where the author basically gave up being able to upload bug fixes and updates because the tech is so dodgy with respect to browser and all sorts of other exceedingly unreliable technologies.

But Turbosquid and the other model sites don't sell the kind of assets I've already purchased and will likely purchase in the future.

I think there is a general lack of good/ample stuff on Orbolt simply because HDAs haven't caught on yet. Some game developers notoriously like to do everything so they'll forgo having to relinquish credit by doing it themselves. Also, it's technically challenging to make a digital asset that is actually worth downloading and even more so, worth purchasing. Perhaps as the value of HDAs become more obvious, the demand will become greater for DAs that are more configurable and can be indistinguishable from someone else's implementation of the same asset in a different game.

i agree with most that was said here. I wish too there would be more stuff like this: https://www.orbolt.com/asset/Haybyte::mb_plumage_system [orbolt.com] (it is a feather tool) very nice.

I also think that sidefx would wish for more complex stuff like this but…. big studios dont care about 80€ or so to release their inhouse tools.
And small freelance developers rarely have a tool like plumage to sell.

I have made some nice assets. But to make them saleable with niceer interface and documentation is a lot of work… I simply dont have time to prepare this.

regards

Olaf