Any rumours of Houdini 19?

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A big chunk of the artists using these indie licenses live in less developed countries, with subscriptions for renderers ranging from 300-600+ Euros per year with no indie pricing anywhere, this leads to a dead end in a lot of cases, when you can create mind blowing stuff but incapable to render it because you can't afford render tokens or the licenses to run on multiple machines.


There are affordable alternatives so I don't really get this line of thinking. Octane is about $20/month, 3Delight is free for a very capable version, and there's always Blender (even if you're using Houdini for sims, they can be sent over and rendered in Blender Cycles fairly easily).

People who know me know that I'm all for speaking up and bringing up criticisms when there's a reason for it. In this particular case I really feel that this isn't an issue -- there are some amazing options available for anyone willing to do a bit of research. I think the primary issue is that far too many people are set in their ways and unwilling to consider other options.

Regarding your particular situation with your client -- this is more of an issue of how you negotiate with your clients and set your work terms than about the cost of external renderers.

I'm just stating the obvious: any current 3D software should have it's own, integrated, proper renderer. That's what Sidefx seems to be working on.

Heck, the renderer nowadays seems to be the most prominent module most companies are focusing on. As I said, Autodesk's and Maxon's major acquisitions in the last few years were render engines. Isotropix made quite a fuss about their "Angie" release, same with Blender's CyclesX or the future of Eevee, there's not much needed to be said about Unreal 5. Nobody is talking about amazing new features in the area of sculpting, modeling, texturing or whatever - because there is almost nothing at this point to present. But for far too long rendering was treated as an after thought.

Btw, I tested 3Delight and found it to be too slow. Octane could be very viable if they didn't impose a moronic 1000x600 pixel limit on the demo, which makes it unfeasible for me to properly test before a project, while the Redshift demo has no resolution limit - but unfortunately for twice the price.

Another thing you should know, even in India, where vfx is a thriving industry, a vfx artist gets an average of 200 Euros a month at top places like DNEG and Co, so go figure what someone working in the local media industry makes, not even speaking of other, less developed countries.

But let's wait what Sidefx was brewing in the meantime. Hopefully we'll see the first iteration of Karma GPU in H19.
Edited by Sygnum - 2021年9月13日 06:18:41
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Regarding Angie, I wonder why gpu + cpu combination is much faster for them. What's technology behind it? Is XPU the future?

Edited by FaitelTech - 2021年9月13日 02:33:12

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Hi.

A lot of the integrated render engines provide better support in terms of integration and documentation. It's CPU/GPU time verse user time for me. I could be using the fastest renderer on the planet, but if I have to spend a lot of time working out how to do something due to limited documentation, or integration it sucks my time up.

Best
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Hi.

A lot of the integrated render engines provide better support in terms of integration and documentation. It's CPU/GPU time verse user time for me. I could be using the fastest renderer on the planet, but if I have to spend a lot of time working out how to do something due to limited documentation, or integration it sucks my time up.

Best

Exactely. As great as a lot of these engines are, dealing with the idiosyncrasies of each of them eats up a substantial amount of time. Like settings regarding sampling, etc. or total incompatibility of certain geometry etc., to this day I get error messages in Redshift with converted IGES geometry but don`t have the time nor nerves to hunt them down and just hope it won`t bite me in the back...
Edited by Sygnum - 2021年9月13日 06:28:29
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I'm looking forward to seeing what H19 brings in the Karma department. A DCC should definitely have a world-class native renderer and Karma already has a lot to recommend it. Its main problem is that it's just too slow and noisy at this point. I'm a bit concerned that SideFX will be playing catch up for a long time. Practically speaking, how can it be expected that Karma would be as mature as Arnold, V-Ray, etc? Maybe SideFX can pull it off!
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Since this thread seems to have shifted to render engines, I figured you guys might enjoy this commentary on the subject by everyone's favorite German duo:

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]
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In case anyone is interested in what Maxon has to offer with the latest R25 release...

https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/115494-cinema-r25-release-announcement/ [www.core4d.com]
QA Specialist at Greyscalegorilla |PolyMarvels YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqXuTLiaL-jqvn3LK1XlwHg [www.youtube.com] | Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/polymarvels/?hl=en [www.instagram.com]
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In case anyone is interested in what Maxon has to offer with the latest R25 release...

https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/115494-cinema-r25-release-announcement/ [www.core4d.com]
I don't see many people happy with the release over the internet... Not that I'm very versed on the C4D release history. But I recognize we're fortunate on how many features and improvements each Houdini release usually brings.
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SIgor420
In case anyone is interested in what Maxon has to offer with the latest R25 release...

https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/115494-cinema-r25-release-announcement/ [www.core4d.com]
I don't see many people happy with the release over the internet... Not that I'm very versed on the C4D release history. But I recognize we're fortunate on how many features and improvements each Houdini release usually brings.

Maybe you are not talking to the right people then, this release marks the 1st public beta of RedshiftRT
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At this point, no one is happy about it. ITs gonna be even worse if Houdini delivers a strong release as they usually do.
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At this point, no one is happy about it. ITs gonna be even worse if Houdini delivers a strong release as they usually do.

C4D R## new features release == Your average monthly SideFX LABS update!
>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]
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SIgor420
At this point, no one is happy about it. ITs gonna be even worse if Houdini delivers a strong release as they usually do.

reading C4Dcore pages on this release it does seem that way. If Houdini delivers on H19 and Blender continues with good releases things could get dicey.
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I am a C4D user and quite love the ease of use of it. But this release is a big effing joke. Some (intense) UI changes and Redshift RT? WTF??? Again nothing done with body paint, no improvements to the internal renderers (yeah, I know, because they want everyone to subscribe RS), no improvements to interaction speed with heavier meshes etc. Laughable and sad, because they seemed to have woken up from their deep sleep state...

But yeah, I think Sidefx messed up the whole industry's expectations with the amount of features and improvements :-D Can`t wait to say goodbye to C4D for good...H19, please give us a first incarnation of Karma GPU!
Edited by Sygnum - 2021年9月15日 04:59:59
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thanks god I left c4d boat 3 years ago and I am so grateful!
It was just amazing to say goodbye to thousand "do just one thing" plug ins!

now... go karma, go!
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I think this is a great opportunity for SideFX, it truly is. If they once again pull of a strong feature release, plus closing the gap of missing small features and adding to the simplicity it's gonna be a great time for them. I embarked on the Houdini journey 5 months ago and I couldn't be happier about that decision. I just hope SideFX stays true to itself and never go to the path of just more profit over artists.
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I embarked on the Houdini journey 5 months ago and I couldn't be happier about that decision.

I remember you from the C4DCafe days, you were pretty hardcore into C4D. Weird how the first admin of C4DCafe jumped to Modo way back when, which in turn got me to consider alternatives to C4D about 5 years ago (after trying Blender which simply wasn't ready back then, and Maya which I decided was not for me). So now you're the latest cross-over. Welcome!
>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]
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I embarked on the Houdini journey 5 months ago and I couldn't be happier about that decision.

I remember you from the C4DCafe days, you were pretty hardcore into C4D. It's weird how the first admin of C4DCafe jumped to Modo way back when, which in turn got me to consider alternatives to C4D about 5 years ago (after trying Blender which simply wasn't ready back then, and Maya which I decided was not for me). So now you're the latest cross-over. Welcome!

I will not gonna lie, I was probably one of those fanboys no one likes and I was blind and I had a dream to work at Maxon, which I eventually manage to accomplish but then 2y after, things slowly started to change and today we have what we have. Houdini somehow opened my eyes wide open. I tried Houdini 3 times in the past and I was unable to make a cut which made me feel dumb. On top of that, I was always discouraged when seeing that Wrangle node, for some reason I get panic attacks. Even today that's the case. But I can see how things are changing. I watched a lot of tutorials in the past 5 months, everything I could find free and some paid. I also pretty much watched all of your tutorials too, great content btw. What I have realized is that people who are trying Houdini for the first time and getting discouraged are watching the wrong tutorials. Watching Entagma tutorials for beginners is probably worst thing to do, as they always using some Vex no matter what, which is fine for advanced and technical users but for typical C4D, Blender user not really, you just feel dumb because you don't know what's happening and why and you have impression if you cant do Vex you cant do Houdini, which I have realized its really not true. Seems to me SideFX really made things much easier and more straightforward. One good example is where Indie-Pixel guy using a vex for one particular technique when dealing with curves and proceduralism, then I've noticed there is a node for that exact technique and you don't need Vex. Labs tools are a gem in the Houdini arsenal. Those tools making a lot of difference.

From my point of view, as a modeler I need few things to be added like proportional beveling, symmetrical cuts, a way to copy the Knife tool, or to add more cuts with the Knife tool without being forced to add more than one Knife node. Also when cutting, it would be nice if there would be some kind of preserve curvature mode in case you are making cut on a curved geometry. Ability to see colored nodes in the Operator Tree manager. Ability to activate and template nodes from the viewport and I think that would be all. I think the navigation is really genius, the fact that you can navigate node stream from the viewport and jumping from node to node is brilliant...few more of these additions would make modeling solid as solid it can be with node systems.

And thanks for the WELCOME note, much appreciated.
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Watching Entagma tutorials for beginners is probably worst thing to do

I agree 100% with this. They have gotten a bit better in recent times, but they still rely heavily on VEX even when there is a node-based solution available.

But yeah, my impetus to start making tutorials was to try and convey that VEX isn't 100% required for using Houdini.

As an ex-C4D user, one of the tools that really was a game changer for me was Henry Foster's MOPs which seems almost custom made for C4D crossover users.

I admit that there are things I do miss about C4D, especially their tight integration with AfterEffects. I wish SideFX would open up a conversation with Adobe about that (they're obviously collaborating on the Substance tools, so why not AfterEffects?).
>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]
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so why not AfterEffects?
I guess it's the matter of demand
Assuming that a large part of customers are still large studios using Linux and that for to me unknown reasons AE doesn't have Linux versions, then automatically there is less demand for integration
So maybe with adoption by indie an mograph customers the focus may change in favor to those needs, like it did for games in recent years
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The real offender here is Adobe. Instead of what every major compositing tool is capable of, that's being able to import fbx, alembic etc. they only did that custom tailored solution between c4d and ae, which sometimes sucked big times with those plug-ins, it got better with the cineware implementation but still takes up way too much time if you're unlucky. With some hacking you could also import Maya files, don't know if that still works.


And regarding Entagma. Moritz overall has a few tutorials without any vex code in it. But Manuel...phew...extremely frustrating to watch and to listen to.

On the opposite, I can only recommend Steve Knipping or Tyler Bay. Or the joy of vex from Matt Estela, which teaches the basics in a very easy and fun way.
Edited by Sygnum - 2021年9月16日 03:30:12
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