bobc4d
he is good but he also has some mesh issues, a number of triangles and I would hazard a guess a lot of ngons.
That's part of an exercise of his to model without the need to go Sub-D - the model is used at render-time as you see it and therefore the n-gons will not matter. He has other videos and works in which he uses 100% quads and tris, he is after all one of the most successful mech artists that worked on many blockbuster movies.
Barrett Meeker
- Bevel (make it merge edges so it always works to the right width)
- make either the edge divide or subdivide tool work for making a round edge more round without loosing the edge group.
- make extrude work on single points (like extending a curve)
- give Fuse the average position snap + fuse points option in one sop.
- sweep node, give this an auto-uv option, and give it a built in taper option.
File RFEs for these if you haven't already. They'll stack up on to mine and possibly others'.
Barrett Meeker
… Overall I love Houdini but I find myself having to use 3x more nodes that it seems like I should because of little missing features that feel like they could have been integrated into nodes. I end up making my own hda nodes but that really really slows down your workflow sometimes to make nice ones. I think these little quality of life improvements might not get headlines but they will really add up and make it so much better. I'll post more as I remember them. Thanks!
Indeed, but so far SESI hasn't been a big fan of these small, “quality of life” improvements. Not to be confused with essential features of which many have seen the light, otherwise you'd be thinking what the hell am I talking about. Regarding “quality of life” improvements, I've been filing RFEs and beating horse skeletons on forums to no avail since H14. Very few have seen the light.
GoetzingerC
McNistor
But you don't need a “don’t keep history context”, because there's no performance cost to node accumulation.
What you need, is for SESI to make sure you can do traditional Sub-D modeling with the netview closed.
edit:
Should probably add:
personally, I would never close the netview.
I don't think the final goal should be the ability to model with the node view closed at all times. The node tree is what differentiates Houdini from other 3d software, and anybody working in Houdini, even those who primarily model, should embrace at least acknowledge that it's there.
I don't think anyone should care about or manage other people's final goal.
What SESI should do, is offer freedom of choice to all of its customers while not abandoning the values and guiding principles that the company stands on, proceduralism being one of them. What I proposed above is exactly that: give people the freedom to choose badly (working with the netview closed) while you stick to your core philosophy - proceduralism.
If SESI wants a piece of those industries where modeling (Sub-D and sculpting) of characters/creatures and their animation is a central part (those would be games and film mainly), SESI should not commit the same mistake Marxism did, which was to ignore one characteristic of human nature - self-interest.
Similarly, SESI should not ignore the hardcore modeler's nature of “not giving a a fvck about proceduralism”. If I'm modeling a car, or a robot, or who knows what hard-surface model, I do not need proceduralism. I really don't. It can enhance my work here and there where duplication, placement and distribution of various elements would be greatly helped by a procedural approach, but it's really not mandatory since there are non-procedural solutions even for those.
OK, so this is reality. SESI, you or anyone else can choose to deny it or ignore it. The people that so far expressed “anti-procedural feelings” (sounds a bit НКВД or Gestapo - anti-party sentiments
) and even downright asked for a “non-history mode” and many others that didn't even bother to post after trying Apprentice, will stop by, sniff the air and move on to other applications and rightly so, because if they want to model the next blockbuster's Robocop, they'll not find the optimal tools here. About those that stayed and complain, you can ask then the obvious question: if they're not interested in proceduralism, why are they here? You'll have to ask them directly to know for sure, but I can speculate that their answer would be that they like other aspects of Houdini and even proceduralism itself, but not for modeling.
So the options right now is to ignore them and therefore let them scatter, or give them what they want, whilst pissing off the established user-base (me included) by making Houdini like 3dsMax with the only history being the undo stack, which would be a mockery of one of the company's core principle, reflected in Houdini.
Or, or - you knew it was coming - make Houdini work perfectly in viewport with the current and future modeling tools without the need to fiddle with the netview. I'm aware it is a huge task, because Houdini all its life has worked almost exactly the opposite - work in the netview, while almost ignoring the viewport. It might be never 100% achievable, but huge strides towards that goal can be made right off the bat, should SESI decide to at least aim at it.
I don't see a forth option.