od[force] Houdini 11 Wishlist

[digitallysane]

The Houdini 10 wishlist had quite nice ideas. Most of my requests are still standing

Dragos

[altbighead]

-uber shader.

[kubabuk]

PBR irradiance caching

[sanostol]

very good idea!

-updated ogl display (instances visible at any point not only in particle context, and also in any shadingmode)
- threaded particles
- threaded rbds
- better threading of fluids ( right now it does not scale well to 8 cores)


- a way to match fur to a subdivision

This post has been edited by sanostol: 14 July 2009 - 08:24 AM

[michael]

topic name changed and pinned...
have at it!

[phrenzy84]

more elaborate fur styling tools. Bend would be one.

Even if it is add more functionality to the Edit sop so the Sculpt tab can be used like tweaking, Move with a radius. I'm not a whizz with CVEX so trying to bend bunches of hair/fur in different directions is pretty difficult if i do it one point at a time with the guides.

And for more ideas on Fur i would look at Modo's styling toolkit. (very flexible).

edit:// and some more updates to the COP system. I hear that it hasn't been touched much in a while. (although i could be wrong)

This post has been edited by phrenzy84: 14 July 2009 - 09:04 AM

[Netvudu]

production-quality shaders, production-quality shaders,production-quality shaders and one official übershader.

[digitallysane]

1. Speed and memory management. It's 2009 (by speed I mean everything that favors it: multithreading, optimization, GPU acceleration etc)
2. Since it's 2009, a competitive cloth toolset (not only *working*, but competitive with the ones already available)
3. CHOPs integration into the UI and more direct/interactive CHOPs workflow. Go (much, much) further with what was started with the Motion Effects in H10
4. Better filtering for Mantra
5. Faster raytracing, GI, SSS
6. High quality OpenGL2 rendering and shading (with all the bells and whistles)
7. OpenGL2 shader authoring context for VOPs, and output OpenGL2 shaders from existing Mantra VOP networks (as much as possible); as a consequence, viewport preview of shaders
8. Further develop COPs as a Deep Raster processing compositing package, integrate it with IPR
9. More developed hair tools (more combing tools, long hair toolset)
10. Animation Layering
11. Capture/deform unification (muscles and everything else)
12. Improvements to the network editor. Nice stuff in H10, but still feels clunky compared to Nuke; stop constraining the network to one direction (top-to-bottom), make the sticky notes usable (zooming of the text with the zooming of the network etc), fix the bugs with the display of network boxes, polish everything; For such a mature node based app, the network editor is still so far from what it should be.
13. Unify POPs and DOPs
14. More usable ramps (and make them zoom-able)
15. Multiple selections in the dopesheet; ripple editing of keyframes
16. Nicely packaged toon rendering shaders
17. More flexibility with licensing; a feature to allow locking of a network license to a particular computer (basically making it node locked); among other things, this makes it possible that I can take one of my studio's licenses with me on my laptop when I go onset or I want to work at home during the weekend (I actually don't wanna do that, but you get the point);
18. Rendertime surfacing of particle fluids
19. Character tools should get some attention (see 11. also). Nothing has been done there lately, they are lagging behind.

I paste this from the H10 wish list, as it feels just as important to me now as it was then:

Some improvements and additions to existing editors or panes could tremendously improve the animation workflow:

1. Long overdue: let the user change the color of channels in the Curve Editor; also let the user specify a single color for all the channels in a channel group; give the option that those colors overly the whole timeline in the Spreadsheet view and the Dopesheet view

2. Allow the Parameter Spreadsheet to show groups of parameters chosen by the user; allow it to show channel groups; allow the user to color the rows (and even the columns). (there was some discussion on SESI's forums about this, http://www.sidefx.co...t=spreadsheet)), but I'm more for a customizable spreadsheet.

Both 1. and 2. are actually intended to improve spreadsheets as animation interface. In principle spreadsheets can be a wonderful animation tool but that depends heavily on the visual layout, because without good layout and coloring, they can be very distracting and hard to read. I recently watched this interview http://www.navone.or...-interview.html and liked the spreadsheet UI quite a lot (of course I'm not sure i understood how it works). Houdini's Channel Spreadsheet could be very useful if channel groups could be colored (along the whole timeline), now it's too hard to read. Also, the Parameter Spreadsheet is a wonderful tool for having a global view at the parameters you're interested in at the current frame, but again, it needs the capability to put params of choice on multiple rows, colored in a meaningful way. If I put a character asset in the spreadsheet now, I'll get a mile long scrolling line of parameters, and this is not useful.

I left out some stuff which I consider very important but I'm sure it will be mentioned by others (faster fluids etc)

Dragos

[geneome]

A retopology tool (or set of tools) would be a nice addition unless there's some great sop setup that can do a good redrawing of points on a model that I haven't found (anyone know of one?).

[edward]

digitallysane, on Jul 14 2009, 02:22 PM, said:

... let the user change the color of channels in the Curve Editor...

If it helps, these were made theme-able in H10.0. Look for "ChannelColor" in say $HH/config/UILight.hcs.

[Fomal]

- Multithreading improvements in dops/pops
- Better/Faster OpenGL feedback in the viewport
- More elaborate help cards for DOPS (low level nodes) and Chops

[digitallysane]

edward, on Jul 15 2009, 03:42 AM, said:

If it helps, these were made theme-able in H10.0. Look for "ChannelColor" in say $HH/config/UILight.hcs.

I mean the ability for the user to choose a particular colour for each curve in the Channel Editor. Very ofter Houdini makes 2 or more curves the same colour (or very close) and having the ability to change the colour would be welcome.

Dragos