I’ve recently started hardcore learning of Houdini (after two small attempts of dabbling with it.)
SideFX Houdini is a 3D animation/simulation software package. Everything and anything is possible in Houdini. If you can dream it, you can do it. It's primarily used for VFX in film/television/games, but it’s also used in medicine, scientific visualization, architecture, and product design.
No Plugins Necessary
A major roadblock in 3D modeling is when you get an idea to do something only to find out that you need to buy an expensive plugin. Even when a plugin is cheap, plugin developers have a habit of disappearing/stopping development. Plus, how much you can accomplish with the plugin is always limited by the imagination of the developers.
You never need to buy a plugin for Houdini. Houdini gives you all of the low-level tools you need to build whatever you want.
Houdini is more of a lifestyle than learning a software package, a lifestyle you will be hooked into once you see what you can do with Houdini. You can do things which are otherwise impossible to do in any other program.
Houdini is built from the ground up to be fully procedural, everything is a node. Procedural modeling is initially slower than direct modeling, but the benefits of proceduralism is the ability to go back and make changes at any time, and make hundreds of different variations of a model. Proceduralism allows you to build worlds on a scale that you would never have the time and energy to model directly.
Read the documentation first before watching tutorials. It may take you a few days or weeks of reading before doing anything. Reading the manual is boring, but in the long run will save you headaches, as you will have less problems than if you rely on tutorials, because you will have more fundamental knowledge. Finding answers on your own is an invaluable skill because you will reach a point where there are no tutorials because you're doing something which nobody (or almost nobody) has ever done before.
You need to treat learning Houdini like learning a foreign language. Houdini is very complex, with several thousand nodes and each node has a number of parameters, multiplying into god knows how many thousands of parameters, but like learning the most common words of a language, because of the Pareto Principle, most of the time you will be using the most common nodes.
Gall’s Law
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
Start with small and simple projects, and work up the complexity with each subsequent project. Do not dive into Dynamics (DOPs) when first beginning with Houdini, because it will be way over your head. It’s better to start with surface operators (SOPs) which are geometry nodes, and learn about attributes, before tackling bigger things.
To get the most out of Houdini, you do need to learn how to code, because you can only go so far with nodes, although you can do a lot with only nodes. For coding, you may need to learn about vector algebra.
Houdini supports four programming languages: HScript, VEX, Python, and C++.
HScript is a legacy language before Houdini supported Python. VEX is based on C++, but it's a shader language rather than a full scripting language, most notably it doesn’t support recursion or multi-dimensional arrays.
Houdini is constantly updating and upgrading its architecture, and as consequence there are nodes which become deprecated. This can be very frustrating because if you are watching an old tutorial, nodes will be missing, and the new node which replaced the deprecated node might not do the same thing. But no sweat, because deprecated nodes can be brought back! If you go into the HScript Textport and type “opunhide” you can get a list of old nodes which you can then restore with “opunhide (context) (node)”. (In what other program can you bring back old features?)
Houdini has an astronomical learning curve, but don’t let that scare you away. The difficulty of learning should not be a deciding factor for you. Given enough time, you will climb Mt. Everest.
Houdini artists are rare, and highly valuable commercially.
Last edited:
