teknomage1

just wanted to put another vote in for gentoo. setting it up is a little more complicated than Fedora/Red Hat but the responsiveness is worth it (was for me anyway, your mileage may vary). There's some good articles in the gentoo forums [forums.gentoo.org] about getting houdini runnning on gentoo.

Among others Digital Domain uses houdini. As for why it's not talked about much, do the math - Maya $(~2000/~7000), MAX $(1700-3000), Houdini $(17,000/ (No price for escape listed)).

i believe each person you give the cd to would be required to actually go to SESI's site and register as an apprentice user but aside from that it sounds cool.