Hi as part of my BSC VFX Production Technology investigation i am researching into Hair simulations, comparing Houdini and Maya to each other to determine which software is best to use for Hair sims, looking into the user interface, the learning curve of using both software. as part of my thesis, i would like to have some insight from those who have used Maya and Houdini in regards to hair simulations or even other similar simulations and would like to know your opinions on the two software, what the pros and cons each one has over the other and what your prefered choice is.

I imagine you might get quite a biased response here… it being a Houdini forum. That being said ive used both in production.

It all depends on the setup. On Lady and the Tramp we were using maya, with proprietary tools. Amazing results both grooming and sim. However on a show yet to be released we used Houdini, mostly out of the box, only some tools created.

I preferred the Houdini setup just because most of it was out of the box but to be honest you can get good results in maya you just might have to develop a lot of tools though.

Yeah my intention is to post on both these forums and the Autodesk forums to work around the whole bias factor
were you using Xgen on Maya