hMonkey
menubar, layout of the buttons and the nodes are all wrong.

Way ahead of you, I'm already working on a V2. I've made V1 essentially in a vacuum and came here for some feedback, just so I can understand where I was wrong.

In your opinion, what's wrong with the menubar?

Don`t know if anyone else said this but the only thing I find a bit too distracting and cluttering are those double rows of icons in the 3D viewport left and right. I´d prefer single rows respectively. I abolutely love the rest!

Something to think about also is that software experiences for navigation are undergoing a major re-conceptualization since you do not need a well maintained navigation and buttons to communicate quickly and semantically with the functionality anymore. Search, inference, history telling, and process communication has become core to many new interactions and will surpass the usability of GUIs.

A semantic interface would be the current Design paradigm that will shape the next wave of software experiences.

For me that want use Houdini mainly for character animation (yeah i know that for some folks in industry that might sounds crazy but i strongly belive that Houdini will become better tool for keyframe animators that basicly constatantly moves and tweaks bazier curves and small pixels that represants keyframes)

Few principles of UI are critical:

UI must be:
- quiet BACKGROUND so it dosnt compete with animation itself. It cant be too distractive.
- must be minimalistic if it comes to exposed buttons. Fe. I dont need 3 snapping options visible all the time.
- must be customizable like Z Brush UI so i can use tools that i need. Also customizing part is fun.. you know its like tuning your car guys like it hehe
- Ergonomic.
- Easy to identifie important things (very strong colors) . Like fe. If AUTOKEY is on? (So my work isnt lost becouse i didnt notice it was OFF all the time xD) And strong visual indicator on wich animation freame slider is curently on. (Usefull when very tired working 12 houers on fixing animation during production

I know when it comes to simulation it dosnt matter that much. But when comes to hand keyframe animation UI is REALLY REALLY important.

Trust me that well designed UI for animators will attract more users to Houdini.

Ah and by updating and upgrading UI no one is talking about replacing nodes! Nodes are upgrade by themselfs already compared to MAYA.

But i have feeling that this UI is made in old technology that is time consuming to upgrade (its 15 years old!) Time to change i think

UI lacks things like manipulators for non linear animation (Imagine it like bars in Adobe After Effects) or blocks in UI that contains some data. Where you can mix and blend it together like movie clips in Adobe premiere or Davinci Resolve.

That king of things iam thinking when i state that current UI sux

I like only how nodes are represented but as OP show there is also room for improve.

I forgot. For nodes Icons im totally for illustrative icons. BUT way bigger!

I miss something like Fusion Bins where you can see those icons in big scale and quicly grasp what each node do. And memorize them in graphic way

Its way better than jumping to Help files (wich btw opens for ages and are not practical)

Big visual bin browser for all nodes and shelf tools FTW! (It would be Great for noobs that are not programmers).

Here how it looked in Digital Fusion. It was easy to grasp idea quicly.

.

PHENOMDESIGN
A semantic interface would be the current Design paradigm that will shape the next wave of software experiences.

I don't know, with as conservative of a community as Houdini's, you don't really want to be on a cutting edge of anything, other than the tech itself. I say, let's see some successful examples from other softwares first, then adopt the best ideas. Are there any examples of any softwares that are doing it successfully that I can take look at right now btw?

ruffemotion
I don't know, with as conservative of a community as Houdini's, you don't really want to be on a cutting edge of anything, other than the tech itself. I say, let's see some successful examples from other softwares first, then adopt the best ideas. Are there any examples of any softwares that are doing it successfully that I can take look at right now btw?

The work is already being done with my graduate research so you do not need to be patronizing or diminishing. You seem to think for others a lot. I invite people into the design process. Specifically, Houdini has the ML Regression node that is for regression on "latent"s which could be semantic vectors. So again, honor the technology it is literally there and you miss that by looking so much elsewhere.

Your proposal makes nothing "anew". Houdini is fundamentally asking for something transcendent and custom. Something that adds to the history and is worthy of a change for. Derivative approaches will not work. Do not pay attention to other software. There is plenty of inspiration from the material that Houdini has. The new can grow without the grift of a graft.

If anything, Houdini is Radical and Mis-understood, definitely NOT conservative.

Understanding the context of Houdini is very important. It is at it's soul about making creative tools and sharing those tools with others then express themselves outside of Houdini. In this context the UI is part of the creative material and imposing on it is a high-order that does not make sense when the tool eventually is used elsewhere by a "less technical" artist.

Silos that were convenient for the division of labor in industrialist production pipelines will be broken down and give way to
deep "Generalist" and disciplinarily will be more in demand than a specialized approach. Industrialized methods for animation will dissolve into distributed tools where everyone in school communicates through animation enabled communications.

We now arrive at today, more and more 3D computing will become a basic literacy through technical diffusion and the industrial forces that held "crunch" in animation studios and "charette" in architecture will have no sway on the creative professional, nor the pipelines for distribution. As the market for entertainment jobs shrink due to industrialist market dynamics, there opens a creative job market based on sustainable design services.

Houdini is well positioned to provide a bridge and visible pathways for creatives that need to transition to sustainable work that embraces expression while providing maximal well-being for others. Multi-discipline (many) and trans-discipline (across) practice can thrive in Houdini.

The methods I use are not new. Everything I reference is about 30 years old and therefore ready for application outside of the aire of "cutting-edge", or has this horizon not changed over this span of time?

It is more constructive to think about Houdini as a Knowledge Graph of which you make creative compositions from. The Semantic Web has been around for a long time and very successful in healthcare where I spend a good amount of my practice in. It is based on Knowledge Graphs and these have been the core foundational technology that ran Google search and Netflix recommendations. Pre-LLM hype etc. The Generative Design Research sessions have been around since the 90s used at very large companies and governments. This is the provenance of my approach.

Resources to look into would be older references not newer.

Material Design


Bret Victor

PHENOMDESIGN
The work is already being done with my graduate research so you do not need to be patronizing or diminishing.

I wasn't trying to be patronizing or dismissive, but I apologize if I came across that way. I appreciate your input.

It's just that everything you referenced is fine and good, but it's all theory. What I was asking is whether there are any examples I can look at right now where this theory is applied. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say.

PHENOMDESIGN
If anything, Houdini is Radical and Mis-understood, definitely NOT conservative.

Yes, but I was talking about the community around Houdini.

ruffemotion
It's just that everything you referenced is fine and good, but it's all theory.

Design theory is where you need to operate until you get collaborative data and let the UI generate from the UX defined through collaborations and creative sessions. It will grow from the richness of interactions. I apologize that this is esoteric but these methods are in current use everyday. I have found it to be soooo much more inspiring than screen grabs or mockups.

I look at these resources and I see places to start so I am not sure how to help other than to provide the ideas that can birth new creative practices. These are all real interfaces, Google's Material Design and iOS, that are made.

I would recommend studying more theory until you can start imagining something new.



Also, remember that there are many intelligences at work in Houdini like how Douglas Hofstadter illustrated parrallels in Godel, Escher, and Bach. One source of inspiration could be bridging the intelligences of MATH, GRAPHICS, and MUSIC.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [commons.library.stonybrook.edu] (Full edition, hosted by Stony Brook University: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/library_books/1/)

ruffemotion
What I was asking is whether there are any examples I can look at right now where this theory is applied. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say.

I conduct research which will be published in my thesis. These are from collaborative creative sessions and I do not use outside examples. I only have my work as implementation reference as this is R&D.

I will be making the methods available after I graduate specifically geared toward the creative research, data literacy, and sustainable development.

Material Design is good way to go, also all Apple design too. Its design knowladge at its finest.

Anyway i wonder how "simulation based UI" or semantic UI represented as vectors in multidimensional lantent space could look like?

I mean its good food for thoughts but down to reality UI have to be translated to 2D images composited on screen. Or mayby iam wrong

oldteapot7
I mean its good food for thoughts but down to reality UI have to be translated to 2D images composited on screen.

Principal Component Analysis geometry node [www.sidefx.com]

"Computes the principle components of volume or point data.

Principal Component Analysis , or PCA, is a way to reduce high dimensional data into the most important components. It does this by finding features that reflect the most variation in the data."

Before the PCA node was released, there was the UMAP node in MLOPs and uses trained AI models but semantic vectors have been around longer than current use cases.



also, shape subspace, which you can combine with another semantic vector and get something like the Omniverse asset search:

ruffemotion

hMonkey
menubar, layout of the buttons and the nodes are all wrong.

Way ahead of you, I'm already working on a V2. I've made V1 essentially in a vacuum and came here for some feedback, just so I can understand where I was wrong.

In your opinion, what's wrong with the menubar?

Here's the rundown...

1. Don't mess with high frequency of use buttons' position, you'll just annoy a lot of people
2. Single row panel, customizable on the fly throught ui or made dynamic, with adjustable size.
3. Don't omit stuff just for the sake of ui looking pretty
4. Contextual toolbar could be better utilised as a dockable panel, also the viewport could use a menubar...
5. Menubar is not expandable enough. Also what's in the menubar makes no sense (in the actual houdini)
6. Hiding a customisable menubar and chucking it into a burger is bad...
7. There's no need for inactive states to be shown, it just adds noise
8. Consider better auto layout and useful node info on the side, node's the centre but bounds of the node including the text should be considered in auto-layout...
9. There might be a better way to have those displayed, as well as having nodes a bit shaper, but that just might be me preferring the old nodes
10. Burger menu would better serve to reorder the panels on the fly, dock undock etc
11. Should be customisable, currently in houdini those are useless (lights if you need to reconfigure something) and could be better accessed if they were a part of viewport menubar, but then again there's the D options panel which is also unorganised and crowded...
12. Cache options need to be part of the network view bar, on all network bars. cpu and ram are nice additions but they would occupy less space in the main menubar or titlebar or in the network view as a toggle overlay on the bottom including the status bar, or completely removing the status bar and keeping the viewport status bar that works...
13. Not really sure the font scaling is correct, especially working long hours, 2k and 5k is much better ie 5k as hdpi 2k or 5120x1440, currently houdini uses 85dpi as base which is nether here nor there when it comes to scaling, it's ok on 1080p monitor but who uses those!?
14. There's no need for takes, mantra workflow is dead (or close to), rebasing the houdini to solaris as the main view and then diving in to sops from there would make more sense, with complete removal of contexts ie mat/shop/sop as root level contexts, you would still have the ability to navigate, bookmark and pin contexts, they would just be solaris centric, perhaps explore that.
15. The playbar is a bit crowded, perhaps made dynamic according to task, some input fields are too far apart especially on ultra-wide. The bottom left viewport gizmo just needs to be an orientation gizmo and not a view-cube, remove the viewport tool as that needs to be always active and not a tool, there are a lot of issues that the ui redesign needs to address. param panel although nice the input fields are small for scripting, perhaps a popup input field when there's an expression or a dedicated input field editor dockable in the ui and dynamic according to the input field?

anyway just a few thoughts...

PHENOMDESIGN

ruffemotion
I don't know, with as conservative of a community as Houdini's, you don't really want to be on a cutting edge of anything, other than the tech itself. I say, let's see some successful examples from other softwares first, then adopt the best ideas. Are there any examples of any softwares that are doing it successfully that I can take look at right now btw?

Material Design

30sec of them explaining that they do not know what material design is, tells you all you need to know.

hMonkey
30sec of them explaining that they do not know what material design is, tells you all you need to know.

It is however, plainly illustrated and exhaustively documented.

Its hard to explain because it is something that is made. As illustrated it is a made interface based on 3D paper. It is not "surface" but an actual material. It is difficult to verbally explain Design knowledge to others.

Also shipped as all of Google software for the past 10 years.

Material 3 is the latest version of Google’s open-source design system. Design and build beautiful, usable products with Material 3. [m3.material.io]

PHENOMDESIGN
I would recommend studying more theory until you can start imagining something new.

Forget theory, you can theorise all day and come up with essentially cr@p like material design.
Houdini's ui is well established and mostly good, it just needs fixing, updating and reorganising of few things... in other words improve the practical usability and readability of the app.

hMonkey
Forget theory, you can theorise all day and come up with essentially cr@p like material design.
Houdini's ui is well established and mostly good, it just needs fixing, updating and reorganising of few things... in other words improve the practical usability and readability of the app.

This is completely paradoxical. Where do you think terms like usability and readability come from or are measured by if not theory driven approaches? Theory is the generalization of a specific case for more general utility. At least that is Design Theory.

PHENOMDESIGN
It is however, plainly illustrated and exhaustively documented.

Its hard to explain because it is something that is made. As illustrated it is a made interface based on 3D paper. It is difficult to verbally explain Design knowledge to others.

Also shipped as all of Google software for the past 10 years.

Yes, and it works for them in context of their eco system, but even that is cr@p, there's just no other word for it. I prefer practical shortest path customisable approach... whatever that means
Offering design theory does not work in context of Houdini, you need to understand Houdini and the work that's being done there and people it's for, in order to design for Houdini...

hMonkey
Offering design theory does not work in context of Houdini, you need to understand Houdini and the work that's being done there and people it's for, in order to design for Houdini...

How is that not what Design Theory does specifically and best? Would you say that software engineering does that?

PHENOMDESIGN
This is completely paradoxical. Where do you think terms like usability and readability come from or are measured by if not theory driven approaches?

All I see is the ui and ux are getting worse and worse and less usable on account of those theories...
Also houdini is highly sophisticated and complex program, it can be approached as say... the mail app. the rules are different, sure there are some things that are applicable from theory but that's about it...

EDIT:

PHENOMDESIGN
How is that not what Design Theory does specifically and best? Would you say that software engineering does that?

Design theory is broad aspect not applicable always to everything in every case, and waving a banner obey design theory or perish is foolish.

Anyway, it's all good let's move on...

hMonkey
Here's the rundown...

Thanks a lot! I'll definitely keep all this in mind while I'm working on the V2 of the mockup.