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

Edited July 14, 2009 by sanostol

[michael]

topic name changed and pinned...

have at it!

[abvfx]

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)

Edited July 14, 2009 by phrenzy84

[Netvudu]

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

[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.com/index.php?option=com...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.org/blogger/2006/06/infa...-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]

... 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]

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

[TheUsualAlex]

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.

Heh... i am not sure I'd agree with removing the network constraint... After using Nuke for a while, having an omnidirectional graph can become quite a bit of nightmare for TDs when they have to troubleshoot other people's scene file. With an omnidirectional graph, people will have to be extra careful with their layouts in order to get faster help...

As it is now, I find Houdini's directional graph much faster to read than Nuke's (unless the Nuke artist make all due diligence to keep it readable)

[Magnus Pettersson]

Lots good stuff have already been said here so ill just say speeed speed speed speeeeeeeeed... thread the shit out of the application so the multicore processors dosnt stay calculating heavy stuff with 100% when they could be at 800%!

[Andy Nicholas]

Good idea for a thread. Just thought I'd drop in a few ideas myself:

1) Let's break apart the SHOPs into reusable sub modules. Sure, we can make "sub-shaders" in VEX, but the whole thing could be made to work much nicer. Just look at XSI's rendertree or Maya's hypershade (actually, scrub the last one). In Houdini, all the preset materials are essentially uber-shaders (albeit limited in their application) since they have no way of driving parameters on a another shader and they have such a limited use as they can never support all the options that an artist would want. They'll always want to "just plug in a fractal noise into that input parameter". The new Pyro solver offers an ingenious idea with it's modifiers, but still, it's not a solution.

Please consider the irony of having the most procedural-node-based 3D application on the market, not supporting the plugging of shaders into the input parameters of another shader.

This is not funny.

2) Make cloth... umm.. work. Sorry, don't mean to be flippant but it just doesn't hold up in production scenarios in any way, shape, or form. Even in lowres tests it's hugely unreliable. Any work on this would hopefully benefit soft body sims too.

3) Speed. I know everyone's aware of this, but XSI's ICE and Maya's nCloth are kicking Houdini's ass right now. God only knows how much work it would be to get Houdini running to that level of performance, I sympathise with the development team, but I think people have seen the bar raised to a new level and Houdini needs to match it. Otherwise, I think Houdini's reputation as a serious package for simulation is at risk.

4) Document everything fully. For example, the docs for the Fluid Solver are really poor when you consider its importance.

5) A couple of trivial issues with the network editor, but important for useability:

a ) Stop that thing that happens when you align your nodes to the grid, go down a level, then come back up, and they've all shifted slightly away from the grid position (either that, or the grid itself has moved). This drives me nuts!

b ) Sometimes when inserting nodes from the main window, the network position of the newly created node goes a bit crazy and can mess up the rest of the layout too. As a general rule, I don't want Houdini to start automatically rearranging or shifting my nodes, as I've usually spent some time trying to lay it all out in a sensible way. I can't quite remember how to repro this, so if I manage it again, I'll post back up here.

Thanks

Andy

[digitallysane]

Otherwise, I think Houdini's reputation as a serious package for simulation is at risk.

Indeed.

D

[dbukovec]

- edge smooth without separating vertices, and what Andy said, and what all You said

[Allegro]

Indeed.

D

I have to agree with this one. Houdini is beginning to garner a bad rep for it's speed.

[abvfx]

dito. Speed should be the primary focus of the next release.... then Fur styling tools

[lukeiamyourfather]

I'm a relatively new user to Houdini and performance is probably my biggest gripe. Often there will be a single CPU maxed out for a few minutes while the other 15 are idle. Five years ago with two processors it would be annoying to use only 50% of the available processing resources but not a huge deal, with six core processors out (and more cores soon) its a bigger deal since the system is 90% or more idle most of the time. Its understandable that not everything can be multithreaded, but there's definitely room for improvement right now. Cheers!