I have been teaching myself Houdini for the past 3 month and its been one hell of a journey. I am currently a full time graphic designer and have decided to move into the world of CG. Unfortunately I cant afford to go back to school so I have decided to learn it on my own. A difficult task let me tell you, but I have not allowed it to detour me from achieving my goal.

I decided to teach myself Houdini, after a long look at other packages out there. I just fell in love with the potential power of Houdini. I do plan on learning another package such as Maya for the sake of having a more well rounded skill set (to get a job). But I want Houdini to be my number one app. I welcome anyone out there that may have some advice for a man on a mission.

Anyway, on to my question. I have gone through several tutorials and videos including Fast Track and most if not all of the modeling videos I see are for hard models, such as a stool, a bridge, a spoon or a elevator, (dont get me wrong those were great and I learned a lot) but nothing for more organic models such as a snail, a fish, a bird or a character. I have read many of the forums out there and many suggest looking at a Maya tutorial and trying to do the lesson through Houdini. And, though I do think that is a good idea I also think it would still be nice and helpful to see a video tutorial of such modeling for Houdini specifically.

If there is one out there please direct me to it, or should I just learn Maya, Modo or Zbrush and forget about that kind of modeling in Houdini?

For organic modeling in Houdini I don't know of any real tutorials. However, techniques are really similar from one software to another for that task. So I guess, worse case, you could watch a tutorial from another application and try to make it work in houdini… You don't need a big set of tool to do it. It's all about polygone modeling, point tweaking, poly extrusions and polysplits…

Good luck!

You can try learning free Wings3d. It is a purely modeler with alot of good modeling tool set. It can outperfom some of the pro modelling apps out there.
It is linear in nature and easy to learn