Sam Klock

This has been bothering me a lot lately. While I appreciate that development is trying to help lower the learning curve for new users, can we please go back to a naming convention that makes sense? Or a naming convention that is at least standard to itself?

Example: Parts of the new sourcing workflow is great. Fluid collisions without build collision mask slowing the sim to a crawl, awesome. What isn't awesome is within the entire workflow are confusing names of paramaters that do the same thing but are named completely differently(I'm looking at you block size and swirl size). Can we please use a standard USED EVERYWHERE naming convention? Noise is noise and even if it is turbulant/anti-aliased/curl/etc it would be nice to have names standard between them. Roughness is roughness(grain? really?), octaves make perfect sense, and what the heck is pulse length? I know what it's doing in the vop but what is with that name? I have to constantly hunt down the docs or dive into the node to see what it is doing because the name makes no logical sense(not just pulse length). Also why are the fluid source workflow nodes not named the same? They are used so heavily in conjunction why is one called “Fluid source” and the other called “Source volume”?

This “appealing to new users” has started to show itself in updated workflows as well. It seems like more parts of houdini are going away from being procedural and going to one size fits all uberflows. The fluid source node is a perfect example of this. You have one node that does 10 different things, but the amount of python updating things when you change the presets(which should be above ALL the tabs always visible and not hidden in the second to last tab), makes me feel like houdini is trying less to teach and more to do it for the user under a black cloth.

IPR doesn't ALWAYS use raytrace, if preview is toggled on(which it is in the screenie) it will use raytrace. If you toggle that off it will use whatever engine the rop is set to.

I cannot recommend these plugins enough: http://www.houdinistuff.com/ [houdinistuff.com]

I used the bgeo writer on almost every project I did in college. The bgeo writer for maya works very well(last I used it).