As many of you know, Foundry has discontinued Modo. After building my career on it, I’ll truly miss it, but it’s time to move forward.

I’ve chosen Houdini as my new mainstay over Blender, primarily because:

1. My workflow is highly procedural and largely non-destructive (about 80%).
   
2. My team’s USD-based pipeline would benefit from working within a single application.
   
3. Blender, while impressive, felt like a huge reset for me; Houdini offers a richer return for the time investment.
   

That said, I’m hoping to regain some key functionalities in Houdini to get back up to speed quickly. I know there may not be direct equivalents, but I’d love insights on how others have tackled similar needs.

The features I’ll miss most:

Action Centers:
Allow quick adjust of transform handle's center and axis. Examples:

Origin: handles at world origin
Selection: handles align with selection
Element: click on component to handles with any vert, edge, or poly.
Modo allows you to stack these. For example, you could have a local action center but have your handles align to world. There are other such features but I'm trying to keep it somewhat short.

Examples in Action:

Element Action Center

Origin Action Center

Local Center, World Axis


Falloffs:
Attenuate the strength of a tool with falloffs. These can be blended together as well with gradients and/or multiply, add, subtract, etc.

Linear Falloff with Easing

Radial Falloff

Curve Falloff

Texture Falloff

Curve and Weight Map falloff


UV Transform
Project geo onto a target mesh using its UVs. This is a big one for me. I use this A LOT.


Lastly, if equivalent tools don’t exist, do you think these could be built and reused as recipes in Houdini? Any guidance on this transition would be a massive help—thanks in advance for your insights!

Welcome! You may want to log RFE's for features you'd like to see in Houdini as per https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/15603/ [www.sidefx.com]
That way, they'll actually be assigned to programmers at SideFX.

Houdini has in the past been a very mixed bag for modellers - excellent for procedural modelling, but painful for more traditional direct work. However... we now have an excellent direct modelling plugin called 'Modeller 2025' - available here:
https://alexeyvanzhula.gumroad.com/ [alexeyvanzhula.gumroad.com]
check out the very helpful Discord group here: https://discord.gg/keG9eA6E [discord.gg]

Houdini native plus modeller is a killer combination.

There is a lot of functionality in Houdini's transform handles. If you want an excellent and comprehensive introduction you can grab 5 hours of top quality free training that covers this here:
https://www.hipflask.how/the-core-essentials [www.hipflask.how]

"Lastly, if equivalent tools don’t exist, do you think these could be built and reused?"

This is really the essence of Houdini - it's really a 3D CG tool building kit, with a decent set of pre-built tools to get started with.

UV-Transform looks like creep (only for polygons). This can be done (with VEX for example) if your geometry has uniqie uv-coordinates (1:1 mapping between uv and points). You can convert the uv geometry to normal geometry (P <- uv ~ uv-space) and capture the object you want to deform by the uv-geometry using xyzdist(), which gives you all you need to transform the back back onto the original uv-geometry (primuv()).
Here is an example (if you want to try)