Strife

Sorry folks … Elvis has now left the building… he was “All shook up … uhhu”

Well - I'm new.
Pretty new to 3D, played a little with Blender then very recently bought Silo.
Also used Maya PLE a bit till I now discovered Houdini Apprentice. I think I'm hooked on 3D even though I'm not good at all and somewhat older. (Is 29 too old to learn and get into the industry?)

First of all thanks for SideFX giving away the apprentice license to play with! Man, was I excited to see this.

A couple of things I'd like to point out and a couple of questions if I may be so bold.

1.) Why is Houdini not more widely known? Silly question but in relation the other software packages Houdini is not very well known from what I found on the net and from what I can tell (Only installed Houdini 2 minutes ago) this is a blatant shame!

2.) The website/Marketing. From my first couple of visits to hte Houdini site, and reading along seeing if there are tutorials and so forth the noob user would never know Houdini can be used for Modeling as well.
A couple of months ago I came across this site and left - I thought Houdini was just an animation tool - Almost like Motionbuilder.
Even the slogan says “3D animation Tools”. I would venture a guess that I'm not the only one to have left because of this.
I re looked at Houdini again through the article on Garagegames and the DTS exporter I read today saw modeling in there and looked more closely - digging through the tutorials /features I saw modeling. “AWESOME” And that was that.

Just something SideFX might want to look at. Use it, don't use it.

3.) I see Houdini gets used in Film quite a bit, is it more common in large studios?

4.) Any game studios use Houdini? Given the DTS exporter inclusion I would think that SideFX is def. angling that market. I hope so - XSI looks to capture market share from 3DSMax from what I read.

Anyway thanks again - sorry for the long first post.
Hope to have many questions for you guys!
Thanks in advance.