Hi, I would like some advice about blender x houdini workflow for a future personal project (a feature film). I want to add some vfx/cgi elements to some scenes using both softwares to optimize the workflow, I plan use them this way.

Modeling - Blender,Houdini (Houdini for procedural stuff, still gonna learn both modeling perspectives, not gonna bother with blender’s geo nodes I guess )

Sculpting - Blender

Simulations - Houdini

Animation - Houdini (heard kinefx is good)

Materials and rendering - Blender

The last one is the one I have most doubts, in one hand I like Houdini’s karma xpu, however jumping between the Solaris environment and object level environment seems not that efficient, plus I don’t plan to be a vfx artist, (at least for the moment)so why bother using the usd environment.

Blender’s cycles is good enough, as far as I know the only thing that may hinder blender is light linking which is coming next update 3.6, even tho I would prefer karma xpu over cycles because is seems to be faster I just don’t think the Solaris/USD environment suits me.

What do you guys think?

Can't comment on the other topics. But you can use karma without touching Solaris. Have a look: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/out/karma.html [www.sidefx.com]

bollili
Can't comment on the other topics. But you can use karma without touching Solaris. Have a look: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/out/karma.html [www.sidefx.com]

Then lighting is whith LOP´s or OBJ´s nodes?

Lighting is in obj - or where you want it to be.

You could pull your scene (or parts of it) procedurally into Solaris and continue to work (incl lighting) from there, if you want. I am no expert with that, but I tried it and it worked pretty well. For my kind of projects usd workflow is over the top, generally. But, imho it's by no means complicated to go there if you need some features from it without building everything in Solaris from the ground up, first.

OmarLpezRobles
Sculpting - Blender

Simulations - Houdini

Animation - Houdini (heard kinefx is good)

Materials and rendering - Blender

The last one is the one I have most doubts, in one hand I like Houdini’s karma xpu, however jumping between the Solaris environment and object level environment seems not that efficient, plus I don’t plan to be a vfx artist, (at least for the moment)so why bother using the usd environment.

Blender’s cycles is good enough, as far as I know the only thing that may hinder blender is light linking which is coming next update 3.6, even tho I would prefer karma xpu over cycles because is seems to be faster I just don’t think the Solaris/USD environment suits me.

I think the best thing is to use tools you are already familiar with. Learning will slow down things quite a bit, especially with two programs at the same time.

For the start you might want to use Houdini where it’s best at, for effects, simulations and proceduralism. You can always grow from there at a later time.

Solaris is actually pretty neat, especially if you want to experiment with lights and layouts. But it’s a hard start and Karma XPU is beta and still a bit incomplete.

KineFX/Animation/Solaris will probably mature quite a bit with H20

Best

personal take: you have a good enough plan. if nothing else, Cycles will allow you to use rendertime masks with GPU acceleration (tear/wear/dust/dirt/etc) among other things

OmarLpezRobles
Sculpting - Blender

Simulations - Houdini

Animation - Houdini (heard kinefx is good)

Materials and rendering - Blender

I can't talk about sculpting ( i have done a bit in Houdini). But kineFX is great also with MLOPS. Also rendering... i really like to work in Houdini. I use redshift, sometimes in sops, sometimes in Solaris. I really love solaris for staging. I use ODtools for my material database

OmarLpezRobles
I want to add some vfx/cgi elements to some scenes using both softwares to optimize the workflow

Okay, so you basically just want to add a few effects to live action right?

If you really want to optimize the workflow my suggestion is to begin your setup so it will support render layers or baked out data. That way it could be possible to cooperate with various Indie artists. You could make this into a test case for something like that.

I use both, I would say focus on Houdini for fx and game workflows, simulations in Houdini is crazy.
Blender is an alrounder, I use it for 3D modeling.
For Sculpting, Zbrush is a better choice than Blender.
check out this: https://pctechtest.com/best-3d-modeling-software [pctechtest.com]

Hi. Not to go too off topic but how are Blenders sculpting tools. Are they usable?. Best. Mark

Mark Wallman
Hi. Not to go too off topic but how are Blenders sculpting tools. Are they usable?. Best. Mark

Depending on how hi-res you are going are.

On my PC, under 5M polys they're very usable. Above that, not so much.

raincole
Depending on how hi-res you are going are.
On my PC, under 5M polys they're very usable. Above that, not so much.

the great thing about zb is the undo history slider. lightning fast, very intuitive. in b3d if you are in hi-rez simple press of CTRL+Z takes seconds. and if you are (for example) trying out different positions of your alpha brush those seconds delays becomes super annoying fast.

it is definitely useable, but if sculpting is your (main) thing, zb is king

For modelling, I would use Houdini, it blows Blender out of the water IMHO, have a look at Polymarvels Project Cabin to learn the Houdini modelling tools...

Project Cabin... [www.youtube.com]

Karma XPU is way faster than Cycles, and it looks much better IMHO, plus you get MaterialX, Houdini is an all around better tool, again, IMHO, and it has no limitations, unlike Blender, which has many, that's why I switched to Houdini, as an artist I got tired of hitting a wall with Blender, and to be limited in what I could do, so except for sculpting, and maybe retopology, I see no real good reason to use Blender if you are to learn Houdini anyway!

For sculpting, retopology, modelling, UVs, and texture painting, I suggest 3DCoat, much better than Blender, again, IMHO!

3D Coat... [3dcoat.com]

Mark Wallman
Hi. Not to go too off topic but how are Blenders sculpting tools. Are they usable?. Best. Mark

IMHO what makes the Blender sculpting tools usable is the voxel remesher, but you can't go high polys with Blender, you need to rely on texture mapping for detailing, too bad that Blender really sucks at texturing though, but if you are going cartoony, it is quite usable as a sculpting tool, plenty of YT channels with Blender tutorials on sculpting!

OmarLpezRobles
Hi, I would like some advice about blender x houdini workflow for a future personal project (a feature film). I want to add some vfx/cgi elements to some scenes using both softwares to optimize the workflow, I plan use them this way.

Modeling - Blender,Houdini (Houdini for procedural stuff, still gonna learn both modeling perspectives, not gonna bother with blender’s geo nodes I guess )

Sculpting - Blender

Simulations - Houdini

Animation - Houdini (heard kinefx is good)

Materials and rendering - Blender

The last one is the one I have most doubts, in one hand I like Houdini’s karma xpu, however jumping between the Solaris environment and object level environment seems not that efficient, plus I don’t plan to be a vfx artist, (at least for the moment)so why bother using the usd environment.

Blender’s cycles is good enough, as far as I know the only thing that may hinder blender is light linking which is coming next update 3.6, even tho I would prefer karma xpu over cycles because is seems to be faster I just don’t think the Solaris/USD environment suits me.

What do you guys think?

Coming from Blender as well this sounds like a solid plan, I'm not sure about the animation part, as I have never animated in Houdini and rarely ever heard that someone does, most people I know are using Maya or Blender.

I found the entire lookdev process of lighting/shading/rendering to be very enjoyable and efficient in Cycles, also stuff like light path mix shaders is a lot easier than in Houdini if you need that kind of stuff. Also if you are using GPU/XPU you still have some serious limitations with H19.5, for example no cryptomattes which is a big issue for comp.
On the other hand loading gigantic cache files into Blender is nearly impossible and causes Blender to freeze or crash. So I would say if you have small amounts of data Blender is fine, with increasing data sizes however you most likely need to use Houdini because it's the only way of handling it at all. H20 will also most-likely make XPU a lot safer to use in production, but for now I would either go for Karma CPU or even decide for an entire different renderer like Redshift in Houdini.

eaniix
Coming from Blender as well this sounds like a solid plan, I'm not sure about the animation part, as I have never animated in Houdini and rarely ever heard that someone does, most people I know are using Maya or Blender.

I found the entire lookdev process of lighting/shading/rendering to be very enjoyable and efficient in Cycles, also stuff like light path mix shaders is a lot easier than in Houdini if you need that kind of stuff. Also if you are using GPU/XPU you still have some serious limitations with H19.5, for example no cryptomattes which is a big issue for comp.
On the other hand loading gigantic cache files into Blender is nearly impossible and causes Blender to freeze or crash. So I would say if you have small amounts of data Blender is fine, with increasing data sizes however you most likely need to use Houdini because it's the only way of handling it at all. H20 will also most-likely make XPU a lot safer to use in production, but for now I would either go for Karma CPU or even decide for an entire different renderer like Redshift in Houdini.

Yeah, still a few limitations in XPU beta, hopefully H20 will solve these, as for the lookdev part, Solaris is slowly replacing Katana as the de facto tool for lookdev, more complicated, yes, but also light years ahead of anything Blender has to offer in that regard, as for Houdini animation tools, not only does KineFX rock for mocap/rigging/animation, and I have no doubt that H20 will have quite a few more KineFX goodies, but Houdini also has a top-notch crowd system, while in Blender you have to rely on a very dumb particle system for anything resembling crowd animation, and even if there was a good crowd simulation add-on for Blender (the best I know of is Horde), Blender just can't handle large datasets, so no large crowds are possible in Blender, again, if you use Blender for anything other than small animated shorts, you are limiting yourself as an artist, at least IMHO!

GCharb
Karma XPU is way faster than Cycles, and it looks much better IMHO

3D Coat... [3dcoat.com]

Really ? You did some test ? I mainly use blender (I do a lot of bottle/Glass product, so karma xpu can't for the moment), and find that cycles x is very fast...

philippepetitpas
Really ? You did some test ? I mainly use blender (I do a lot of bottle/Glass product, so karma xpu can't for the moment), and find that cycles x is very fast...

I mostly tested volumes, I used the same vdb, hdri and camera for both tests, in Houdini I used the kma_pyropreview shader with a density of 5, in Blender I used the shader that comes with the cloudscapes add-on, I tried to match both as close as possible, both are rendered with no denoiser, render time in Karma is 12 seconds, in Cycles GPU 3 minutes 42 seconds, here are the results, I also uploaded the files for both test on Google Drive, if you want to have a look!

cloud_test.rar [drive.google.com]

Karma renders VDBs using nanoVDB from nvidia, cycles does not have that (yet?). so yeah, volumes are as fast as it gets with XPU right now.
everything else cycles handles pretty well, let alone having rendertime masks and other cool mumbo jumbo that XPU simply does not have

Isn't NanoVDB for the real-time pyro stuff only? And volume rendering in Blender often has artifacts in them, like in the image I am showing in my previous post, while the XPU render is perfectly clean!

But yeah, XPU is still missing a few things, but all in all it's not bad for a beta, and much faster than Cycles still!

The top image is CPU, the bottom XPU...