Lauren Thomas

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!