ntmonkey

Ex softimage user here. A few things I think might be helpful to migration.

Learning houdini won't be overnight, and probably won't give you the same experience that Softimage did. That will be hard to beat. Houdini, otoh, could really benefit from Softimage user's experience.

However, this side of the 3D world is a very powerful one if you're willing to put forth the time and effort. First of all, volumes. I'm talking OpenVDB, Pyro, and Flip. These tools are workhorse of this package. And like ICE, once you set it up, you can reuse and share via OTLs.

Leverage Mantra. It's an incredibly powerful renderer all for free. There are just some things you can do in Mantra you can't do in Arnold. You can pass damn near any type of data to the renderer without having to wait for 3rd party developers to implement it. RGB, vector, point clouds, it does it.

Houdini to me, is the most unified anything out there. You can pass data through any context all the way to the final render if you want. Take your time. Get to learn it and you'll leverage a very powerful tool in your arsenal.

And lastly. SideFX is a company that listens and innovates. I have watched Houdini tackle problems of incredible size and scale, and given the complexity of what it can accomplish, only asks their users to educate themselves a little in return.

The hope is that with time, SI users can lend their experience regarding usability while simultaneously leverage one of the most powerful data engines on the market.

Good luck everyone.

-Lu

I'm on 10.0.397 with the 2007 17in mac w/ 8600m video card. I'm still getting flickering in the viewport.

Good new tho, my menus are back!