Hi,

I am new to Houdini and a hobbyist. When I learn a new package, I always practice building the same object below. It's called an “Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere”. The corner piece of the sphere is a challenging (at least for me) object to build in a way that is ‘perfect’ and clean in SubD.

Consider it my acid test to verify that I am comfortable with the basics of the modelling portion of an application.



I have dreamed of being able to use Houdini for almost 15 years. I always thought it was only for rocket scientists and that you needed a PhD to achieve the simplest results.

I am sure that the current iteration of the application is far more accessible than it used to be in the past. However, I am amazed at the result of spending about 10 hours with tutorials. I have NEVER been able to achieve such a clean and continuous surface with any application that I used in the past whilst retaining full control over the cage.

I always seem to either end-up with either a soup of control loops, having to retopologise after a Nurb'ish/Boolean'ish sledgehammer approach, or end up with a good cage that wasn't 100% perfect (I am a bit OCD).

Houdini is the first application in which I ever managed to achieve this level of perfection without having to push vertices along guides manually.

Thank you SideFX! You just improved my standard of living by 250%

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Since I intend to use Octane for the final render, I thought that it would be a good idea to now add the materials and check that my scene didn't contain something that Octane doesn't like.

I was a bit afraid that I would not be able to re-create the very pleasant ‘look’ that Mantra gave me. Anyway, using the Octane Uber shader, I was able to set everything up in about 15 minutes.

I am using a single GTX 1080 and the result in Octane with very low settings is astounding. Not only is it faster, it also produces less noise with only a max sample setting of 260.

I love the fact that I can have the two render engines and materials running at the same time. I expected the application to crash when I tried rendering at the same time. It didn't!

One the left screen is Mantra. Octane is on the right.

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First test renders. I like the group based UV projection feature a lot

Each one of these renders only take 4 seconds (hence the noise)

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render3.png (2.9 MB)

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bolts.png (2.2 MB)