Hi,

I am playing with the Houdini for few days thinking about moving from my current application(s).

It is great fun but there is one thing that concern me, the units. I am used to model, animate and simulate everything in real world units, it makes everything very straightforward and simple. Houdini ‘non-unit’ system scared me off little bit, but then I been told that 1 unit its just one meter. OK, so .01 is 1cm, .001 is 1mm, not to hard, but then I dropped the character and what a monster he is. :shock:

I am wondering now, shall I reconsider thinking about the unit system? Will my characters play nicely with simulations and effects? How I should approach building my asset system (I want everything to have one scale)?

When it comes to simulation, it was just a matter of making sure you multiply by correct unit. i.e.: For gravity – place that uses meter: -9.81; and place that uses centimeter: -981.

Centimeters works great if you deal with more of a smaller scale environment. Meter works better if you're in a large scale environment (i.e. environment that spans a few miles). Lest you run into precision error. Just make sure you keep consistent across.

cheers

ive found scale attribute in demo character

I just realised that the grid is 8x8, that is just wrong, or can I change it somewhere, I tried to look for it in help, but with no luck.

Anyway, I build all my assets in real scale units (you know, in other application), what should I go for in the Houdini.

Shall I get used to idea I will have to rescale my assets every time I want to re-use them? What do you guys do? As most of 3D that I am doing is happening in real world situations I would like to keep it consistent. Especially that I have some amount of models that I will just convert to Houdini.

Cartoon character is 31 units high, will it work OK if I will decide that one unit is 1m and rescale it down 25 times? And actually I am not able to find the scale box any more, so can I rescale characters easly, or I got it wrong? lol

I own Maxwell and it is recommended to use real world units in this plug-in. What is Houdini approach to this?

So what artist using Houdini do? How they model? How do they create assets?

If you go into the preferences you can set the unit system for the file. It's important for any simulation and for some aspects of rendering. Other than that it's really up to you how you handle scale conversion, since I come from architecture background I don't feel it's too complicated, although sometimes tricky!

you can also check this thread:

http://tinyurl.com/3qhwu5q [tinyurl.com]

Cheers