I've spent about 20 hrs playing around with H20 in the last two days, going through the example content etc.
And while this is an amazing release with more new features than I've seen other 3d software put in 5 years combined, I still think that SideFX does not get it when it comes to artists.
The thing is that not everyone wants to be a TD or a developer when using Houdini. Some people just want to create. Not everyone wants to worry about data flows, some people just want to make, for example, clouds.
Speaking of - they look amazing in demos but let me use this as an example of not artist friendly.
Imagine you're an artist and you get extremely excited about the new clouds. You go and download the Billowy Cloud Generator example from the content library. Amazing... You feel excited! Now you open the scene and right away have a wtf moment. Unless you're a seasoned Houdini user - you have no idea, what's going on in that scene. Even if you are a seasoned Houdini user - you likely still won't have any idea. Unless you're a technical nerd, you will want to close it, run, and never come back. And this is still a simple scene
![](/static/djangobb_forum/img/smilies/smile.png)
This type of approach does not feel like it's with artists in mind. Going back to the billowy cloud generator - nothing in that scene is artist friendly. Why not encapsulate some of these functionalities in some middle layer nodes? Why not build it in a way that when normal artist inclined humanoids look at that - they will just 'get it'.
It's like seeing an advertisement for ordering a cake. You go ahead and order one.
But instead of getting the cake, you get a letter saying, 'here are all the ingredients to make your cake ingredients'. Here are all the chemicals - you can make your own sugar! Isn't it great? And here's some wheat and a grinder and bleach so you can even make your own flour. Isn't it fantastic? No... it's not. Not to mention that sometimes the grinder doesn't work, and you have no idea why...
The problem is that many people just want to get a cake for their kids' birthday. They don't even want to bake it and they definitely do not want to be chemists first.
And I get this feeling with every release of Houdini. It's not getting simpler (other than the dynamics moving to SOPs).
I love the software and the people that make it are geniuses, but with every release it feels like it's becoming less and less of an artist's tool. Every year when I look at something like the cloud example if feels like a seasoned TD with years of experience in Houdini created an example that 99% of artists will never understand.
There's a balance between flexibility and usability and complexity. It's an art. It takes time to think through. And it still doesn't feel like SideFX is striking that balance with Houdini.
The only exception, I'll say one of the few areas in years that I feel like it's been designed with artist in mind - is the new animation context! While there's still a ton of work to do there to bring many standard and expected tools, it's amazing! It's refreshing. You feel like an artist! You feel like you can create. You're not looking at vex code, hundreds of nodes, you don't worry about data flows. You don't have to worry about the chemicals. You can bake! The ingredients are simple, they're made for you not for chemists. I really hope that SideFX realizes the importance of providing foundational flexibility but in a way that doesn't scare the sh*t out of artists.
One more example - so in Solaris, you drag and drop AMD material, right? Great! As an artist you'd like to edit it, right? Like frequency of repeats of the texture... You would think that some as basic as that should be artist friendly, right? Nope... Sometimes I look at this and think how much greater this software could be if there was a level of 'nope, you can't release this unless it passes some basic UX / Artists litmus tests'.
Cheers