I started this thread on September 22, 2016, which was basically when I finally got into Houdini after doing 3D for more than 20 years with other software.
Yesterday I returned from London, where I gave my first ever Houdini Workshop at "The Bartlett School of Architecture" to a group of 8 students from all over the world. They had started using Houdini only a couple of weeks before and none of them had done any real programming ever.
Over the course of last week, I introduced them to many aspects of Houdini and VEX, the central design topic was the Shortest Path algorithm and truncated Octahedrons.
My main goal was, to give them an introduction to programming and generative design and take away their fear of code as something "hard and alien".
(I actually used ordering beer in a pub for explaining the command structure of VEX, if, else, for and for each loops etc. ;-) ).
This worked out very well, they all catched on fast and created their own beautiful results based on my examples.
Richard, my host at the UCL was very supportive and the whole thing was a lot of fun and very rewarding.
I can see Houdini being used in design more and more, since software like Rhinos Grasshopper doesn't really cut it for complex work.
So after SideFX being originally mostly used in movie SFX, then Motion Graphics, then recently going into Games, now this could become another mainstay for their business since Computational Design is growing more and more important and nobody does generative and complexity better.
Thanks to the whole Houdini community, without you I couldn't have catched up as fast!
Cheers,
Tom