Midphase
Technically Houdini Indie is a subscription.

For sure. I tend to forget it due to the fact that it's so insanely low priced and getting a perpetual license would make no sense at all ( as long as you're below the earnings, of course). I mean, it comes down to 14 Euros a month when paying for two years in advance. C4D is 61 bucks and Maya/Max indie is 25 bucks or so, both at yearly payment. The only cheaper solution would be Blender.

Midphase
Technically Houdini Indie is a subscription.

Kinda but not really, but still for a hobbyist more than generous and fair. Not to mention what is included in the package.

Midphase
Technically Houdini Indie is a subscription.

well, kinda. difference is if you don't renew your Indie license Houdini doesn't stop working, it reverts to Apprentice as with subscriptions you stop paying you have a digital paperweight.

Since this entire thread is shifting all over the place, I will add this: I personally feel that when it comes to render engines, Subscriptions actually make more sense than perpetual licensing. I think render tech is shifting way too rapidly to assume that even a couple of years from now we'd all be using the same stuff. With the advent of tech like Meterial X and USD switching between render engines will get even simpler. Today I'm on 3Delight, if GPU's start to become more available I might switch to Octane, if SideFX really spiffs up Karma I might switch to that, or maybe I might just decide that Unreal is the way to go. The only pay model that makes sense in such a rapidly changing tech landscape are subscriptions -- one caveat is that it depends heavily on the price of course as nobody wants to be saddled with massive monthly bills for something they use relatively little in the grand scheme of things.

I don't agree. There are plenty of situations where rock solid versions of x render at x time are locked in for more than
a year or more of time, serving the purpose of the company and it's projects. A perpetual license that continues
to work with builds up to it's subscription date means the company can continue to render for many months or years to come,
without needing to spend anymore money paying for subscriptions to keep rendering frames.

Ideally you offer both. And if a lot of you take a good look at the type of things you are rendering, the tech that existed
2-3 years ago more than covers what you need. CPU cores keep increasing, so even a two year old lic of something that works
completely well for company x and it's projects would equal speed improvements.

There's a misplaced version of reality where you think that companies pivot on things as central as renderer's like they are
ordering lunch. The renderer is a core part of the pipeline, but so are all the other pieces. I think subscription only is
a stupid method of licensing. Offering both options covers both scenarios.


L

tinyhawkus
There's a misplaced version of reality where you think that companies pivot on things as central as renderer's like they are
ordering lunch.

I never said a thing about companies just to be clear. I'm just talking about my world which is comprised exclusively of freelance CG artists working out of their bedroom. In your world, your company isn't going to switch renderers, but that goes without saying, then again your company isn't going to be losing sleep over a monthly charge either.

Even as a solo operator, most moving parts should tend to stay reasonably consistent.
Paying monthly charges on 1000 nodes isn't exactly cheap is it, so there is room for both.
When I say you, it's the collective you. Even small commercials are usually not a place to go willy nilly pulling
up stumps to install a new renderer because of x feature. But that is digressing.
My only point is that both options are valid, and if push came to shove, perpetual Vs sub would be something that
needs to be weighed up properly, by Company X and solo man Y.


Cheers

L

Since SideFX has been pretty hush-hush about this release I imagine they're planning some really big stuff. He are my predictions for Karma:

1. Ultra fast scene previews, including hair and volumes, using a new real-time GPU renderer, Karmee.
2. Karma will have 1:1 parity with every obscure Mantra feature, plus lots of new artist-friendly wrappers for common tasks.
3. New specialized shaders, including glass, volumes, skin, and hair.
4. 10x speed increases across the board for final frame rendering.
5. Simplified render settings ala Arnold and 3Delight. Everything you need will be on one ROP tab.
6. In-depth render progress reporting, including percent complete, time remaining, samples complete, CPU usage, etc.

How many of these features will we have in H19? Place your bets now!

BrianHanke
Since SideFX has been pretty hush-hush about this release I imagine they're planning some really big stuff. He are my predictions for Karma:

1. Ultra fast scene previews, including hair and volumes, using a new real-time GPU renderer, Karmee.
2. Karma will have 1:1 parity with every obscure Mantra feature, plus lots of new artist-friendly wrappers for common tasks.
3. New specialized shaders, including glass, volumes, skin, and hair.
4. 10x speed increases across the board for final frame rendering.
5. Simplified render settings ala Arnold and 3Delight. Everything you need will be on one ROP tab.
6. In-depth render progress reporting, including percent complete, time remaining, samples complete, CPU usage, etc.

How many of these features will we have in H19? Place your bets now!

God, if just 2 or 3 of the things in this list go to h19, I will be satisfied.

Making all the pipeline in just Houdini without any 3rd party render engines sounds really cool, and fast to iterate.

Also, adding to the list, I don't remember sidefx saying anything about xpu rendering, but is that even possible? I don't know if they are working on that, but having all my hardware rendering at the same time sounds fast!

I would be happy with:

1) Finalize Karma and make it on par with Mantra. Incorporate gpu where it make sense. As an artist I should have to create usd stage to see my scene. It feels like a separate software.

2) Optimize / fix the viewport

3) Don't forget Houdini quality of life features, working with graph, data visualization, better vex editor in general stuff to make procedural editing easier.

4) Revamped material system that’s integrated with cops and some painting tools (sim to substance stuff but with Houdini thinking)

5) Revamp curves (including curve editor, animation editor) and chops (user friendliness, speed etc)

6) Evolve fluids. Make it easier to use and artist controllable.

7) Further integration of dynamics like vellum with RBD

8) Continue to simplify and modernize the interface. Make the documentation artist friendly. I find a lot of the documentation feels like I’m reading a scientific paper and description of parameters does nothing to help to understand how they work. Instead of starting and stopping initiatives - finish them. For example - the videos that were supposed to walk us through all the nodes.

9) evolve interactive tools

10) evolve mid range tools like the labs. H18.5 brought some nice mid layer tools in the areas of pyro

11) Evolve kinefx - bring artist friendly animation tools but focus on where Houdini can add value. Maybe specialized character fx?

BrianHanke
Karmee

are you implying eevee? it's pile of sh.. uuhh.. shoestrings. Yes, that's the word I wanted to use.

anyway, I think it's realistic to expect NanoVDB implemented into GPU-driven Karma rendering. So for me if we could render volumes fast and use Karma to make flipbooks with it, I'm good, very much so.

Fluids are already very very controllable. Just look at the ability to use underlying ocean meshes to drive
FLIP sims, custom spline based hero waves traveling through, custom vel fields, the works.
I think maybe you need to watch the Masterclass video on the most recent FLIP and ocean/fluid changes since
H16+.

Vellum and RBD are two totally different systems. One is xPBD the other is a rigid body framwork. They will never
talk to each other the way you think they should. Sidefx added a stiff constraint to 18.5 to have objects behave essentially
like RBDs in Vellum, check it out.

Karma will likely never be on par with what Mantra was. Mantra had 25+ yrs of ongoing integration, and where did it end up?
A highly flexible mess that can do anything, but is too slow to be useful at all. Karma was a proof of concept to highlight
Solaris and USD, it has a long long way to go for true feature parity, and speed.

Brian, regarding render stats, you already have access to those at the required verbosity settings level.


L

osong

BrianHanke
Karmee

are you implying eevee? it's pile of sh.. uuhh.. shoestrings. Yes, that's the word I wanted to use.

Sorry, but this is a rather nonsensical comment. Eevee is a feature to kill for, Houdini could use it really badly. The closest aother viewport renderer came to that was the one from C4D but unfortunately they stopped going forward with that. Eevee will get realtime global illumination quite soon, which breaks away even more instances Cycles would be needed for. It'll also get render passes and a realtime compositor which I'm looking forward for.

For Houdini 19 I'm hoping for one or two of these...

Add-on system built into preferences I just want something simple, less hassle to set up add-ons like MOPS...
Asset browser with large thumbnails/ custom snapshots of thumbnails, a dozen frames of timeline play on mouse hover etc,
City builder tools similar to those in the WetaH announcement,
Custom Human creator Makehuman/ metahuman style (that has KineFX built in)
houdini engine for Blender
Documentation improvements /easier to understand.
More Crowd examples, more mocap instead of just bipeds / maybe an animal like a Wolf or Horse
An update to colour settings and themes. I would like to be able to change some Ui colours of highlights of selections within the colour settings panel in houdini.
More clever colour node utilities without having to go into a vop network to adjust saturation/hue/ type things.

For H19 I would be happy with a beta of Karma GPU and KineFX tools for facial mocap, plus maybe a premade rig system!

Did anyone else just receive a weird e-mail from SideFX?

Sorry about that e-mail blast folks - we were doing a dry run and it went out a lot farther and wider than was intended.

yes I did. So the release is going to be in mid-October?

Let's pretend that the email was not meant to be a praise for our effort in spamming the thread

chrism
Sorry about that e-mail blast folks - we were doing a dry run and it went out a lot farther and wider than was intended.

Damn, I was searching for the build in the downloads list already. It seems I have to wait till mid October to play with the new toys .