Andreas Oberg

For me it is really helpful when the documentation is good. For example the new clouds has good documentation and some great examples. THAT is what we need more of. But some of the new parts have very little documentation and no help. I have found that most of the problematic things in Houdini can be helped with documentation, but sometimes there just is no documentation to get and then you are doomed.

I think LukeP raises a valid point and should be listened to. We should also remember that there may be many more like him out there that could buy the program if some of his concerns were addressed.

Some issues:
- When a new release comes I often lack examples of the new features. I had some problems first testing the new cloud features but then found the documentation which was written well and had examples.
- I tried the new white water which I was really excited about. I could only find the wave system trigger some white water. However it would have been much cooler if you could actually render it and it would look good.
- Then I wanted to try out some of the new Karma features. I started but quickly wished there was an example file to try out, maybe there is one but I could not find it right away.

A few things that I believe would help
- Those Flip Setups like Lava is super helpful. Add more examples that setup basic things for you. It would be great if they would also be ready to render as well. This I think would be the biggest way to help new starters. It was very useful when they let you download explosion example files that looked great. So basically have more examples that look good, and maybe have descriptive tooltips for them too. We could have tons of examples, how to do bubbles, lava, volcanoes, explosions, smoke, water spray etc. They are not that hard to do when you know how to do them, but they can be super tricky to master the first time.
- I wish there were more example materials available. H20 seems to add some from AMD so this is promising.
- The errors could have more solutions in them. I went into Solaris and it begun spamming an error. It complained something about camera missing in the render pass. I had a camera setup so I did not understand how to solve it. If it would describe more how to fix it this would be helpful.
- More tooltips and comments would be helpful. Especially if the tooltips were a bit more in depth, not just a line of text.
- More tutorials. Right now I often feel that if there is a new feature it will not be possible to use unless there is a tutorial or a course on it. The example files would solve this. I think it would be a good thing if SideFX has an example file for every major new feature and at least a quick tutorial how to use it.

I think that SideFX are working on all of the above points, I just wish it was a bit more. A bit more examples and better tooltips.

Cheers,
Andreas

It seems like no matter how I do it there is no way to have a File import of exr sequences with $F4 in the name. If I type it by hand it works, but it will never work if I set it by python or by a link to another property. The result will always be "cannot find file"