249 replies to this topic

[LaidlawFX]

Couldn't sleep so dreaming about the Houdini of the future...

Hard to ask for anything more when you got everything you wanted in the last build, but...

So I've been spending a lot of time building a giant interface, and it would be cool if the parameter interface could get a more advanced facelift. I can do many things with the parameter options they have now, but with the taste on the new ramp design I feel like they can do even more in a year or two for the next version. Many artist on a production will work with the same set of tool for a whole show, so yu want to build them something robust and graceful, and the parameter options are kind of cumbersome. If your lucky you can get three parameters across, ina area that could handle many more. Take for instance a single float channel, a slider always piggy backs after that, it would be cool to remove that and sandwich it between a series of buttons. Or make labels have better controls, for god sakes let me make something bold or italic, or even change the font per a tool. Or if I want a hidden label to appear make it so I can make it visually stand out. Also get a visually creative artist to design some creative and pleasant tools interfaces. Houdini is designed for easy interfacing with a vast array of pipelines, but it would be cool if on the surface level it has some more visual options to work with. I ain't asking for an H8 to H9 change just more options to work with.


An array based vop sop that can be tied to multi-parm folder. The most important thing would be for this to be able to be hard coded in vex, so it can be compiled. This way I never have to worry about hard coding a certain number of options in vex/vops. If I want ten texture layers, or reflection layers I can have it.

A library of production tested shader presets, and some simple textures to go with it. Mantra can be just as good as vray, and ental ray out of 3ds max if the was sought as important to do that. Out of the box I want to render a near photo-realistic car... I know you can do it, tell me how many button presses I need to make it happen, if I need more than fingers on my hand or a vray setup in maya then it's not worth it. This would not take away from the product at all.

Out of the box I want to have a IBL studio light option. Go to HDR Labs make a deal and make the next evolution of the light that can be used to light my car out of the box. The ability exist and this should be standard. Modo does this ooo so good it hurts to think Houdini can't do it.

An updated Houdini Exchange that's designed to make me think about going there first to get really cool stuff. Like a nice suite of tool, or shader sets. Kind of like mymentalray for shaders, but something of the html 5.0 generation.

I'll wait for the OGL stuff to roll out some more before being to picky. But an old request to see more OGL vop shading ability would be cool. Steal some game engine level shading ability and put it in the interface for me to control. I spend my whole day looking at Houdini, some 20,000 hours a year, and I would like to design shaders that look just as cool in the viewport as at render time.

Pretty much I want to make any tool in Houdini a visual pleasure for the artist to work with, and the relative ease to work with it be awesome. Thank you so much SideFX for everything you done so far, and I can't wait for the next generation.

[Erik_JE]

For materials library I think a community based solution would be pretty sweet. I think a lot of the common materials have been created lots and lots of times and that people wouldn't mind sharing with a good platform.

It could be a webpage with predefined rules for materials. OTL's need to be submitted with ~3 renders of the material applied on some suitable render-ball/scene.
Slap a web-service on that and it would be easy to write a plugin to browse/download materials directly from Houdini.

[Tom]

I would like Houdini to have more "connections" with post production softwares. Posibility to export nulls and similar things to After Effects would be awesome. Thats just a small example.

[michael]

Tom, on 19 March 2012 - 08:00 AM, said:

I would like Houdini to have more "connections" with post production softwares. Posibility to export nulls and similar things to After Effects would be awesome. Thats just a small example.

much of this already exists...see chan etc
also alembic export will improve thing even more.

[symek]

Tom, on 19 March 2012 - 08:00 AM, said:

I would like Houdini to have more "connections" with post production softwares. Posibility to export nulls and similar things to After Effects would be awesome. Thats just a small example.

God, I don't know any other production software which can compete with Houdini in interconnection possibilities specially taking not only IN/OUT formats support but also performance/robustness of it. Try to export really long sequence of heavy objs from "the others" great software, or in/out camera with world transformations.

[0rr]

speed ( yea some people just can't get enough ). That is the viewport needs to get faster and overall sop need some love.
Some new modelling tools would be nice too.
A nativ poly and edge bridge tool would be nice.

[altbighead]

Exchange 2.0 for community based sharing of asset/shader/otl/preset and etc.
stuff like -
tagging of OTL for easy searching
sorting based on functionality/software version/usefulness
shader library from both sesi and community
tight user moderated community for quality and less duplicating published stuffs
publishing and maintaing otl directly from houdini
culling hip files both from odforce and sidefx forum and published them in exchange.user collaboration to sort of based on technique/type and user level.
I would love to see exchange integrated right inside Houdini with sidefx assist/comunity based rating/moderating for clean and useful sharing.
edit
Ohh yeah ..MORE SPEEDDDDDD

Edited by altbighead, 19 March 2012 - 10:46 AM.

[Ezz]

It could be so so cool if there would come a plugin for Vray. :-)


Erik

[Netvudu]

dang, I thought this forum was the only one free from "Overrathitis Vrayness"...apparently not.  

[magneto]

What about true edge support? A minor request from me

[phrenzy84]

Im having so much fun in H12, big features and small features are still surprising me. ie I havent seen anyone mention this,

But there are few things i can think of right now that could only be updated in a new release. The exchange ould do with a bit of love. And a scriptable UI would be awesome, for someone who getting to program is a miracle i hate the whole wx and/or pyQt workflow. It would be nice to not to think about/learn it.

Apart for that COP's needs a bit of love and speed will forever be on the list.

and a cluster-like tool would be very nice (even though they have there pitfalls ie vertex membership and not point attribute, there are instances where they would just be really useful).

[malexander]

H13? Well, I guess we did get at least two weeks of rest before a new wishlist rolled out