pluralsight.com Houdini courses?

[ISUther]

Hello,

I have been struggling few days now regarding this Project:

And did think that may be i need also take some training courses with this program in order to understand more advanced tutorials and guides in order to achieve good level in houdini.
Anyone has any experience with that site?
cons and pros?
Recomend some ohter online training courses?
I am from Estonia and here we do not have places where they teach this program in school.
I am not sure is there such place in Finland.
Because i am financing my own food, and cost of living it is not easy to moove to another country to school as then would have no money to pay for rent and buy food.
This is why i am learning houdini on my free time. (From monday to Friday after work and gym about 2 hours) and on weekends 10 hours per day.
Some times less depending on how tired i am. This is my reality as my family cant support me in this mater and i cant take a bank loan to move to another country to finance my school etc.
All i can do is earn money with IT support from monday to friday and learn houdini on my free time and i refuse to belive that it is too läte to learn it or it is impossible to gain good level with Houdini and get good job in this type of work.
I realy like cool animations and i want to learn it to be able to do those animations myself WITHOUT mimicing someone else tutorial.
 

Edited September 29, 2016 by ISUther

[eetu]

Not really an answer to your question, but I just remembered a good old learning thread so I'll just drop this here anyway

 

[shawn_kearney]

I'm a pluarsight member, and its OK. But I kind of feel like I have out-grown it quickly. I also am not really sure how in-depth their tutorials are and feel a bit light on the theory end of things. There's also not a lot of variety available yet.

There are some really good ones, the image-based brick wall dynamics is excellent, and the RenderMan tutorial is also very good. But overall, I think there are better options out there.

[ISUther]

Thank you for replies.
May be Lynda better

Because at the moment i feel that i need more solid understanding of diferent aspects of 3D and how it works in Houdini.
VOP-s SOP-s promoting parameters and same time creating something.
And i decided that it is good to try to do same time small Project.
Small Project that i have mentioned above: "Leafs Project"
That seems to be verry Basic and it would be good if i understand this kind of Basic: how to make object or somethinggrow from point a to point b and how to mage it move a litle.
That should not be hard. And i see no point mooving forward and trying to do more complex and cooler stuff (explosions etc) when i do not understand this simple Basic.
Planed all weekend for houdini

 

[catchyid]

I am also a pluarsight member, and as a beginner they are very useful to get you started. Check out their courses and see if they what offer is good for you or not (I think their courses are tailored more toward beginners)

Also, you can check

http://www.tokeru.com/cghttp://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/dyno/solidswiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

-there are many online tutorials on sidefx website (they have good stuff)

-check Peter Quint Tutorials on youtube, they are really usefu

- Also check https://cmivfx.com they offer "good" courses (they actually have 70% off discount now until October 5th, I think it's a good deal)

-Finally, periodically SideFX offers good webinars you can watch and interact with instructors for free (there is one on particles starting in less than half an hour)

Good luck

[shawn_kearney]

http://www.hossamfx.org/

has very good houdini math tutorials, without getting too "mathy" - very artist friendly, albeit they are a bit pricey; however, there aren't many tutorials on the subject either.

I found his accent is a bit tough to understand at first, but his material is very good and quite easy to follow I got an ear for his dialect. He tends to do everything in attrib wrangle, though I found his examples are simple enough to port into VOP as well.

[ISUther]

Thak you so much everyone.
I am waiting for payday (that is next week wednesday) then i can buy one course.
I did look yesturday also tutorials like:

and

As some things were confusing and did not work as as he had it working. I am goind to go over those tutorials today again to see what did i miss.
It is good that it is weekend so i do not have to worry that i have to go to work tomorrow (as i dont) so i can stay up for longer time
Or not go to sleep at all

And ofcourse i did look at here where do they have online training courses for Houdini and what to get.
https://www.sidefx.com/schools/?categories=2&industries=&certified=&title
 

Edited September 30, 2016 by ISUther

[haggi]

Am I mistaken or didn't you ask already a similiar question here:

And if you do not have too much money, simply try to do all the free tutorials you can get. Have a look at the mentioned free ones in the post above and you will be a real Houdini master if you:

1. do all the tutorials

2. try to reproduce the procedures

3. download all hip files you can get and dive into them, you will learn a lot

[ISUther]

That is my plan.
This month going to buy one tutorial and next month another,
And same time go over the free ones that i can find.
Things usually get more complex when tutorial is based on old versioon of Houdini where they use node or something that is no longer available in new houdini.

Hard is to follow tutorials where person who creates tutorial to explain stuff (for example: shaders and textures)
he brings in one point something that he created before and that is a key element in tutorial in order to follow it.
But he proovides no info on how he created that key element etc. And that is the point you discover that you cant follow that tutorial any more 100%

Same is when some one creates tutorial and uses short cut keys and he is not informing viewer what keys did he press in order to get up some view or promoting a parameeter or some thing.
Thos things hindder viewer ability to learn.

There are soo many nodes that i do not understand and i know that houdini has also VEX and Phyton inside..
I hope that i can become good Houdini artist without learning coding.
(Learned a bit coding in past and i did not like it. It was sooo booring).
But Houdini seems like funn and is interesting and no way booring.
When i did see this:

i was like wow. What a skill.
That is level that is insane:D

[haggi]

1 hour ago, ISUther said:

I hope that i can become good Houdini artist without learning coding.

In my opinion: No. At some points you will need some basic knowdege of coding. Without you will not become a good Houdini artist, only a very average one.

[ISUther]

Ok a little coding or basics I think I can learn in future.
Anyone also participated in workshops from here?
http://www.cgsociety.org/training/
?
I am thinking to spend my holiday money on one workshop.

[michael]

3 hours ago, ISUther said:

I am thinking to spend my holiday money on one workshop.

these are pretty high level workshops - I'd spend more time in Houdini and reading the documentation instead of spending money on tutorials

[shawn_kearney]

16 hours ago, haggi said:

In my opinion: No. At some points you will need some basic knowdege of coding. Without you will not become a good Houdini artist, only a very average one.

You have to appreciate, though, for many beginners, including myself, programming outside of VOPs is pretty intimidating. But often the hardest part of using Houdini seems to be getting through feeling overwhelmed. While, yes, I definitely see the brick wall coming at me (and fast) but I do feel pretty confident that I can take on VEX or Python with enough effort, and I am sure that OP can as well with enough motivation.

[haggi]

The extemely cool thing in Houdini is that you can do interactive coding. Simply try to use a pointWrangle node on a grid and do something like:

@P = sin(@P);

And you immediatly see the result. This way it is fun and you easily learn the basics.

[shawn_kearney]

Aside from being less cumbersome, what other advantages are there to VEX over VOP? As I understood it, VOP is a sort of visual VEX, right? Are there things you just couldn't do in VOP than you can in VEX (even if it would be a tangled mess of spaghetti)? Is it a matter of optimization?

[JulesFromPulp]

Quote

http://www.hossamfx.org/

has very good houdini math tutorials, without getting too "mathy" - very artist friendly, albeit they are a bit pricey; however, there aren't many tutorials on the subject either.

I found his accent is a bit tough to understand at first, but his material is very good and quite easy to follow I got an ear for his dialect. He tends to do everything in attrib wrangle, though I found his examples are simple enough to port into VOP as well.

I saw these recently and was curious about them. The cover art kind of made me question the quality, but I guess it's more about the math than the design aesthetics. 

Good to know they were worthwhile for you.

[shawn_kearney]

25 minutes ago, JulesFromPulp said:

I saw these recently and was curious about them. The cover art kind of made me question the quality, but I guess it's more about the math than the design aesthetics. 

Good to know they were worthwhile for you.

 

If you already know even a little bit about what Cross and Dot products are, then it's probably not going to be the best tutorials for you. If you're like me and playing math skills catch up they're pretty useful.

I wish that the matrix section was a bit in-depth, but it did cover some cool things like how to translate vector attributes along with geometry. I guess in the second part he goes into a bit more detail.

[JulesFromPulp]

17 hours ago, shawn_kearney said:

If you already know even a little bit about what Cross and Dot products are, then it's probably not going to be the best tutorials for you. If you're like me and playing math skills catch up they're pretty useful.
 

My math skills are atrocious. Luckily Houdini is fun and math can really help make some awesome things in the software. Who would have thought years after pulling C minuses in basic math classes I want to soak up as much math as I can manage now. 

Edited October 2, 2016 by JulesFromPulp

[shawn_kearney]

Right! This is the most motivation I've had to learn math since cramming for my placement exam so I wouldn't have to suffer though another remedial math class.

[haggi]

On 1.10.2016 at 3:34 PM, shawn_kearney said:

Aside from being less cumbersome, what other advantages are there to VEX over VOP? As I understood it, VOP is a sort of visual VEX, right? Are there things you just couldn't do in VOP than you can in VEX (even if it would be a tangled mess of spaghetti)? Is it a matter of optimization?

The result of a VOP is vex code which will be compiled on the fly. But I think there is no big difference concerning execution speed. It is more a matter of personal preferences. I prefer coding in VEX simply because in VOP I loose orientation quite fast if the whole thing is a bit more complet. However there are some methods which are not available in VEX like the unified_noise node.