Hello everyone. First post ever. A little background, I've been using Rhino3D for the past 5 years, always had an interest in learning Houdini though. Rhino is a fantastic modeler and I've enjoyed using it over the years but Houdini seems to be able to do so much more. Scary stuff moving to a new program.. to be a newb again.. buh!

Anyway, I think I've finally come to a crossroads. Here's my problem.. tensile structures and mesh relaxation. Rhino/Grasshopper is fantastic at these things but.. omg painfully slow at times!! R/G is single threaded and even relatively speaking its crazy slow!

My current project is to create an organic model using basic shapes and then relax/shrink a larger mesh around it(see pic). I think this might be right up Houdini's alley. In Rhino/Grasshopper it takes forever for it just to set up the mesh and then more forever to shrink the mesh around the objects. The finer the mesh and the more objects to shrink around the time needed goes up exponentially! Each time I have to adjust the settings for a trial run it's at least 20min.

I'm wondering if this can be done in Houdini. If you google tensile structures or organic style architecture, it's almost always done in Rhino. I'm sure it can but I've never seen a Houdini example so before I take the plunge I'd like to know for sure.

Thoughts?

Houdini is not a modeller like Rhino …. Its primary use is for FX / Lighting / Rendering.

The modelling tools have come a long way in the last few releases, I'm actually really enjoying it now and starting to model more and more for a unity project I'm working on.
I reckon what bergkatse is talking about would be something Houdini could handle. The model doesn't seem too complicated then maybe some sort of cloth sim for the shrink wrap?

Hi,
I know both and they are not replacements for each other but can on occasion be used in a complementary way. Learning Houdini can be well worth it but not as a replacement for Rhino. Houdini is more intuitive and faster for some modelling stuff but Rhino's NURBS modelling tools are way more intricate and a bunch of the stuff you can do with Grasshopper is not replicable in Houdini.

A lot of Houdini's recently improved modelling tools are for poly modelling whereas Rhino is a pure NURBS modeller with a few mesh processing tools mostly for clean-up for printing. Be very aware of the differences here.

Forget stuff like sections, layouts, panelling tools, rhino cam, etc. and any of the Archicad and Revit live integrations as well as robust cad format interop. i/o like robust IGES, STP and DWG support. Also running data out for construction and documentation is not the same. For taking in data Houdini doesn't have a concept of layers like in cad programs and as such you will have problems taking in data with any level of complexity. Also unless something has changed recently, naming limitations will result in layer names to get screwed up if layers are named with something other than ascii characters making a roundtrip a royal pain (you need to break layers out into separate files before taking them to Houdini you want to stand a chance).

In your case you might look into writing some script to automate running through various settings for your sim in Rhino over night so you don't need to sit there trying values.

For processing/massaging point cloud or raw mesh data Houdini can be used nicely though. I've only done this in a one-way scenario where heavy geo-data came into Houdini for use in an animation and needed filtering and cleaning but there Houdini breezed through stuff I'm sure would have been a nightmare in Grasshopper.

Best of luck and happy learning,
Fabian

Houdini's nurb tools haven't changed much in years since everybody went poly/subds so you are better off modeling nurbs with Rhino…the poly tools are fine…and improving in H16…one option to saran wrap the objects is to use the saran wrap sop or use the isooffset to turn it into a volume and then create a surface from the volume.

Houdini is more intuitive and faster for some modelling stuff but Rhino's NURBS modelling tools are way more intricate and a bunch of the stuff you can do with Grasshopper is not replicable in Houdini.

I would disagree with this.

Modelling wise you can do anything in Houdini that you could do with Rhino/Grasshopper.

Just take a dive into VEX and spend some time with it and you will see why.

The question would then be; Would you want to.

Probably not as it would take alot of work to do so, but it is entirely possible.

On the other hand you might want to if you were planning on doing a specific type of modelling that was a slight variation of what you could do in another modelling software; and that you were highly likely to use it in an ongoing basis.

And for the original poster, that's probably the question they might have to ask.

The only way to find out is to try and build a ‘tool’ in Houdini that is giving the same results as what they are getting with Rhino. And in that process along the way start to see if the work required to finish such a tool is worth it.

It won't be a waste of time doing such a venture if the ‘project’ has to be dropped as they will learn a number of things along the way that could help working together with what is produced with Rhino.

If you think change Rhino to Houdini you needs to know that Houdini, even though it have NURBS and is parametric based, is not CAD tool.

If you have CAD requirements and needs something better than Rhino for modelling, my recomendation is you look for Catia, Unigraphics NX or Solidworks.

Otherwise, Houdini is the most powerful 3D animation tool at this moment for DCC purposes.

All very good points, thx for your input guys. I guess it's apples and oranges, each has its purpose and strengths. For now I will continue to model in Rhino as well as learning Houdini starting with simulations.