In researching various features of Houdini, I found this comment posted two years ago:

Well we had a few animators working in houdini over the last 6 months. None of them touched it before and they were mix of maya and max users previously. To my big surprise, the interface was the least of the worries. Actually not a single person complained about it because it's so customisable, it just takes a few minutes of setup to make the UI simple enough for animators. The real issues we are having all come from 3 areas. I think this is a very productive discussion now so I'll list them here. I'm not having a rant at all, just stating our findings so far.


1. Viewport speed and stability. I had to radically change the way I like to make rigs for animator for them to be usable in terms of speed. Good example is transparent control objects. Animators love them. Being able to grab forearm geometry instead of bone or null feels very organic and it's easy to setup. However it kills the rig speed instantly in H14 (or the transparency on the bones in general). The same goes for skinning and most of the deformers. I wouldn't have animators work with all the heavy deformation rig in maya either, but for preview it's great to see what mesh is doing once in a while. Is it slow in maya if you turn on heavier meshes, of course, but houdini comes to standstill. Textures, no chance for good speed. We are getting decent speed right now, when we use the simplest proxies and only animate bones and nulls, but put more characters in and you're in for a trouble.


2. Animation reuse. Almost unthinkable right now. Copying keys between scenes, crash. Exporting and importing .chan/.chn files, impossible to get the import correctly back unless you are super precise with scoping the channels. Presets work most of the time, but then your preset list is really, really long after 20-30 shots. (And we'll be outputing 200 a month come next january.) The only way around that right now would be to write fully custom anim library kind of thing, but frankly we simply don't have time to deal with that any time soon.


3. Digital asset workflow. As much as I really love it for most of the pipeline steps. It's very cumbersome for standard animation shot work. Yes if you have enough time to be doing really meticulous layout then it's fine, but in really fast turnarounds it tends to be mess and very often you just need to override one or two things in rig, environment, etc. but still need to keep the asset live to get potential updates. This one I don't know how to solve. Mainly because after last few months I have a phobia from updating rigs in the scene to their new version. Always 50:50 whether it crashes or not.


And outside of these it's simply overal stability. We are having without any exaggeration 10-20 crashes a day when animating. Whether it's moving keys, working in animation editor, updating rigs, scrubing the timeline, you name it. I'm certain many of them come down to wrong drivers, wrong graphic cards (we're all on GTX770 and 760), wrong rigs but it seems like awful lot of them anyway. Quite frankly I'm getting a bit tired of bug reports, simply because it is starting to be very difficult to narrow the problem down so we can post a clear reproducible bug.

Has all of that been addressed in the current version?

Animation is a big part of what I want to do, so I do not want to waste time. Houdini right now looks like the most cost/effective solution for a wide variety of things, but I'm not familiar with it to judge accurately.

Like I said before, these are the things I want to do in my Unreal Engine 4 game:

- big dynamic environments

- elaborate animations, mainly of machines

- simulated projectile weapons, destruction, etc.

- 3D modeling for machines, weapons and buildings, including interiors

I've also been looking into Houdini recently for animation. It looks like they put quite a lot of new stuff into version 16.

These things got me excited:

Auto rig tools:
https://vimeo.com/210956195 [vimeo.com]

Procedural assets for game engines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4QMcpd66T0 [www.youtube.com]

Personally I think Houdini's procedural workflow would be the best thing for rigging complex machinery. You could even make it proceduraly generated complex machinery

I would probably use something else like Zbrush for sculpting, and then bring the parts into Houdini to mash together in interesting ways.

Oh. And you said environments:
https://vimeo.com/209235365 [vimeo.com]

the note is from H14 we are now at H16 so i think the notes from 2 years ago are for the movie production and not for games. for game development houdini is surly the way to go but you need skills!

updates from H15, H15.5, H16 for animation:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/news/15/animation [www.sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/news/15_5/_index [www.sidefx.com] (not much new here but i count delta mush)
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini16.0/news/16/anim [www.sidefx.com]

for the first question there is now the Pose Scope SOP: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/posescope [www.sidefx.com]

game development videos from Ghost Recon Wildlands:
https://www.sidefx.com/community/80-level-ghost-recon-wildlands/ [www.sidefx.com]
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024029/-Ghost-Recon-Wildlands-Terrain [www.gdcvault.com] (GDC inside stuff from the programmers)

hope it helps

My main interest is also animation, primarily in cartoon characters for short satirical videos who engage in dialogue.

I am encouraged by the depth and customization possibilities in Houdini, but I am amazed at the lack of interest on the part of both the creators and users for anything dealing with voice/lip sync. There is an old file that apparently came with Houdini 4.0, voiceCHOP.hip, which provided a framework for analyzing a voice recording and extracting the phonemes to fit the sound, and then using that information to deform a mouth mesh. But that has been deprecated, and though there is still a voicesync node available, as far as I can tell nobody knows how to use it. A tutorial and associated .hip file would be a great help.

If Houdini ever gets really serious about providing tools or instruction on how to help automate lip sync, I think the number of new users would significantly increase.

it's true learning materials are problem(animation and rigging). I hope sideFX create tutorials special for animation and rigging this will help many people who want to animate in houdini. Am learning animation using houdini there are no resource for animation and rigging due to this am using 3ds max tutorials to learn animation. But rigging it's still problem am using the autorig while waiting for the tutorials but autorig lack the facial controls.

larrygj
My main interest is also animation, primarily in cartoon characters for short satirical videos who engage in dialogue.

!Monstro! All Houdini. All rendered in Mantra. No compositing.
!Monstro! [vimeo.com]

I have asked similar questions in threads I have made here in the past. According to the replies I got on this particular thread from the staff members, https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/51388/ [www.sidefx.com] , they are currently prioritizing the refinement of the current auto-rig tools over the development of auto-rig tools for facial controls.

Autorig tools for facial really that important? Great for students but production? I would imagine most riggers use their own setup for facial and it tends to be very customized. People have been animating just fine in Houdini for years so saying that its useless for animation because it doesn't have autorig for facial or can't play back at real time a fully lit final model with deformations and cloth and what have you (personally I haven't seen anything that can do that outside of a canned softimage demo) seems a little silly.

Jim Rutherford
or can't play back at real time a fully lit final model with deformations and cloth and what have you (personally I haven't seen anything that can do that outside of a canned softimage demo) seems a little silly.

Just for info, interactive simulation playback [knowledge.autodesk.com] is existing feature in Maya or Softimage, i think also in Blender to some extent. Of course this depends of complexity of simulation, engine and so on. Some forms of automatized under-the-hood simulation and caching, are traditional part of 3d apps (if ‘simulation’ means calculation based on result of previous frame) like IK solvers on more than two bones (while usual 2 bone ik chain is not, as it could be based on plain triangle formulas).

Anyway, I think, no one said ‘unusable’. Let's say that slow animation playback does not help, in any way. For small reverse example, Creation Graph in 3d Studio Max can do beautiful results, but it can not compile automatically in Houdini way, so not that much of good reputation in start, when it comes to Max's MCG.

Simulation playback is off-topic here, IMO.

If ‘softimage demo’ was a Syflex example with female dancer, exactly this one can't do interactive playback, Syflex is very external plugin. While ICE can go interactively, as well as some plugins, MtSpring and such.