Hi, so not to make a whole pity post but I always found myself needing more time than avarage to learn new things.

I know there’s all the “houdini hard” memes, but after trying to wrap my head around it, the amount of things that seem difficult to me get kind of overwhelming.

I know my way around C4D, I’ve done 3D using octane for a year or so now, so I’m comfortable with it.

Maybe this is where I went wrong but I was told “Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal” by entagma was a good guide. I was following it but very quickly got lost during the VOPS (i think it was) section.

What’s the best way to tackle houdini? I really want to wrap my head around it, but it’s quite intimidating to me.

(Also, My mathematical skills are terrible, would it be useful to get them up a bit while learning houdini? Haha)

My main goal with learning houdini is to use it with Cinema4D,

This is the way…

It may be just that some concepts require more time to wrap the head around than others especially if you are encountering them for the first time

Saying that you are getting lost in VOPs and math sort of tels me that you don't do Xpresso in C4D as it's a similar concept.

It's impossible to learn everything at the same time, so baby steps and starting with tutorials at your own level + asking on the forums while exploring on your own

I'm with Houdini for the past 7 months for now. I had a course and a AMAZING teacher, that really kicked things off for me, but the course was only one day at week so everyday I tried to mess a little bit and the thing started growth! It's a plenty of things to cover but main thing was said: baby steps and try! You'll get frustated but don't give up.

Try Varomix's lamp tutorial instead.

I've been a C4D user for several years, staying away from Houdini because it looked way too intimidating. I've made a shift from motion graphics to designing architectural features, and was soon running into performance and procedural limits with C4D - I found myself having to regularly flatten out generated geometry and store several intermediate states, that produce very large scene files. Also with not-very-complicated procedural setups, C4D would soon slow to a crawl, sometimes requiring minutes before I could take the next step. XPresso is a UX disaster, and was not fun to use even slightly.

It forced me to start looking at Houdini, and now, 10 months later, I never want to go back to C4D, except for motion graphics, and that too, I plan on eventually transitioning over to Houdini, once I learn its animation toolkit.

The learning curve was, and still is, pretty brutal. But it was entirely, 100% worth it. The performance difference is vast, the toolset and well-thought out interface, and the completely open procedural system makes it a no-brainer.

My maths is also terrible as is my coding, but I dove into those as well to relearn some basic concepts, and my core understanding of 3D in general has also improved a lot.

For learning Houdini, I recommend Rohan Dalvi's content as a good starting point, and for maths - khanacademy.org

Also, join the Houdini Discord server and ask questions there too, or just read other posts to learn some stuff nearly daily.

Welcome to the clubs - the one for Houdini users and the one for Houdini users who are (sometimes) overwhelmed or frustrated by Houdini. It's part of the game, you don't just buy a hammer here, you buy a shack filled to the roof with tools and the land the shack is placed on, which has a lot more tools lying around. There's a hut on that land, that is also filled with tools from cellar to ceiling. And not to forget that old castle that belongs to the land with the hut and the shack. That castle has been used for decades to store tools.

Most of all those tools you find in shack, hut and castle look kind of similar, but they are from different times. Some are ancient and feel … strange. Some are brand new and feel … even more strange. Then there are tools that nobody still alive really knows what they do (or, well, wait, there's that grey-haired guy who knows things but people aren't sure whether he lives in the castle or the hut or if he was the one who built the shack!). Be careful, sometimes you stumble over tools lying around on the land and find them so interesting that you forget about the one you were going to search for in one of the buildings. Then you'll lose yourself for days figuring out what the things you found are good for or what you can do with them.

That said, there are many good and almost not quite as good tutorials, introductions, courses and articles out there that lead you around or give you first directions. The “best” is the one that fits your personal needs: What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What are you getting paid for and what are you going to do for fun? Where are your strengths (having FUN is sometimes better than getting frustrated)?

Knowing some maths will help you make better use of the “power tools”. But if your strengths are in creativity, building things - why not use the ready-made combi-tools that give you faster, more flexible results for your craft?

Houdini is not for everybody, it cannot be, because it uses Qt as its graphical user interface - it is absolutely fine to BE FRUSTRATED at times (when you have to use a built-in file browser for example). From my experience it therefor makes sense to know WHY you want to use Houdini. Just because someone said “it's good to add it to your tool bag” - in my personal experience - is about the same quality of an argument as “because it's Thursday, dumbass!”. The tool that is “good in your tool bag” is the tool you know how to make use of, is the tool that you are comfortable with and are those tools that you at least can handle good enough to get a job done.

Give it a try. My experience says: Tutorials are good to get some ideas - just stay away from today's “I'll just copy what the tutorial did and claim that to be my presentation reel” (I estimate about 90% of tutorial-watchers to fall into that category). Houdini shines when you dig your OWN path through it.

Who knows? You might pop your head out of the ground afterwards and find you in a room in that shack that everyone has forgotten about.

Marc

alabamamercy
Hi, so not to make a whole pity post but I always found myself needing more time than avarage to learn new things.

I know there’s all the “houdini hard” memes, but after trying to wrap my head around it, the amount of things that seem difficult to me get kind of overwhelming.

I know my way around C4D, I’ve done 3D using octane for a year or so now, so I’m comfortable with it.

Maybe this is where I went wrong but I was told “Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal” by entagma was a good guide. I was following it but very quickly got lost during the VOPS (i think it was) section.

What’s the best way to tackle houdini? I really want to wrap my head around it, but it’s quite intimidating to me.

(Also, My mathematical skills are terrible, would it be useful to get them up a bit while learning houdini? Haha)

My main goal with learning houdini is to use it with Cinema4D,

Hard to say what will work best for you as people are very different, but for me it didn't take off before I had taken on a very specific task to solve. This gave me both a reason to keep going on and a specific starting point. Risk is high to get lost in the jungle quickly otherwise, at least for me, and also to lose motivation quickly because I guess Houdini isn't the sort of tool giving you trial-and-error eye candy quickly. _If_ however you know where you want to go, start with those nice shelf tools, work through the node networks until you get a glimpse how what's happening, and branch out from there. Once there's something visible in the viewport you couldn't have done in another package you'll go on and start to dig. I bet.

PS.:
advanced (?) beginner's view.

my math skills are lacking too and it has been a really long time since I took math in high school. . . too many years and too many beers.

as a former C4D user, having left it two years ago, let me put it this way. when you started C4D did you pick everything up right away, did you know everything about C4D in first week, month or even year? did you get the hang of Expreso right away? NO? then don't expect it in Houdini either. Yes it has more of a learning curve than C4D but once you do a core dump of Cinemas way then it really makes sense. start slow, as you did in C4D. learn what the nodes/tool do and expand on that. get basics of Vex through various tutorials.

I also highly recommend Varomix lamp project, you'll learn a lot from it. I also recommend IndiePixel tutorials, he goes into good explanation of tools and touches on Vex.

good luck and do not let it get to you, we have all been there.