Houdini 13 Wishlist

[kurtw]

Better hardware/display support for game development. This is the classic scenario I'm bumping into.

Major game studio shows an interest in using houdini vs max & maya. I get absolutely burned trying present things in Houdini, and as a result have to use Max and Maya to output/demo things. Sprite display in opengl seems wildly inconsistent while it "just works" in the other packages.

I mean its almost there, until you display, say a bunch of pyro/flip renders onto cards for sprite particle animation for real time view port playback, and then you get weird inconsistent stencil buffer issues, odd composting/clipping with a skybox turned on, etc.

So then it begs the question.. graphics card issue? I'm playing whack a mole on the hardware side with everything from a quadro 4000 and fire gls to franken pc geforce cards.

It would be neat to have all the hardware rendering/display options on one universal configuration pane somewhere, ie. what viewport drawing to use, texture filtering, etc Instead of jumping around to 2 and 3 different panes. I guess I could write a otl that toggles those...

[motionprojects]

PyVex? So we can do vop magic in python.

[graham]

hou.runVex? http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.5/hom/hou/runVex

[LaidlawFX]

In vop sops for the global variables it be kind of cool to have an OP Input Index like Import Attribute.

[gui]

Would be great if we could draw in the network view. Is far better for documenting than with sticky notes, and faster to block the node structure.

Other thing is to add a background image for each subnet. One great use is for rigging, one can use a drawing to position the corresponding nodes in the drawing.

[shushu]

more work on autorig,would be interesting.

[traiano]

A more easy way to activate licenses

[LaidlawFX]

12.5 soho_mkpath Create Intermediate Directories 12.5.316.22 does not work on image planes different files, when you want to send stuff to different directories...

[LaidlawFX]

Same version as above, alembic does not export when no geometry is present on frame one, this is an issues with a particle stream, need to merge in a small box or point or two.

Also can't get the alembic rop version to work. No solution.... I miss a pipeline, and the internet.

Test scene; basic pop sim with boxes attached to it. The fancy stuff!

Also for bug reports from sidefx to work well on phones.... Can I get houdini on my android phone too?

[Farsheed Ashouri]

Multi threading for everything! Just now I am rendering out a pop network and 1/16 of my cpus are busy. thats my biggest wish for houdini.

[LaidlawFX]

In Houdini's File manager, like the Save as and open dialogs, for the custom path short cuts that you can add and subtract, to be able to put a shortcut name instead of look at the file path name.

For instance your at a studio with out a gient pipe, and you got several shots to manage it be cool instead of looking at a bunch of longer directories but be able to type in the shots name for that directory. There could be a toggle next to the plus minus to change from directory listing to shortcut name listing.

Thanks

-Ben

[LaidlawFX]

A dependency option in network pane that shows group based dependencies. So I know these 6 nodes are used froma group based from here, but with wires.

[dennis.albus]

I really wish for a context where we could build relationship/dependency graphs for node level parameters. Something dedicated to rigging would be perfect. Just like modo's node system or maya's node editor.

This would make rigging so much faster, cleaner and more intuitive than messing around with convoluted and slow expressions in the parameters.

I would not mind if this would be directly integrated into the network view with the option to turn these nodes on/off. Houdini's nodes would then have to have the ability to expose their parameters in a VOP like fashion to wire them up. I could do a mockup if someone is interested.

To be honest I don't understand why it wasn't designed like this from the start, as it is a natural extension of Houdini's philosophy. It just feels weird to not be able to do these connections with wires and nodes.

Edited May 3, 2013 by dennis.weil

[malexander]

It sounds like what you're looking for is CHOPs. An easy intro into CHOPs is to use the Parameter RMB menu item "Motion Effects", selecting one of the effects in the menu.

[dennis.albus]

Hey Mark,

thanks for your suggestion, but unfortunately CHOPs is not even close to what I'm looking for. It is usable to SOME extent for rigging but does not give the amount of control and overview that I would wish for in a Node based parameter relationship context. Additionally it is very slow when working with a lot of animated channels as its caching the whole animation range everytime you change something. I'm looking for a way to work with parameters the same way you can work with attributes in VOPS. Basically replacing the whole expression system with a node based system.

Did you see the modo's schematic view where you can build your control rigs with nodes? Thats what I am looking for.

-dennis

Edited May 3, 2013 by dennis.weil

[andreu.lucio]

Hi,

I totally agree with Dennis,

A object level vops would be so nice improvement to replace expresions when working at object level.

I understand there is many ways of aproching this. Thinking in the Vops SIMD architecture, one way could be done, is something like having objid as global parameters and transforms of those objects as output. And why not, any parameter that is in object level other than transforms, including spare parameters this way thing at SOP level could be triggered easily. I believe his would alow to create even complex behaviors with a combination of object level and SOP level.

Regarding to what Dennis was asking for rigging, where you would want to 'import>doVopsMath>export' object level parameters as transfoms, this could be done with some kinf of import object transform (something analogous to the import attribute) and export object transform to output to the desired objects using regular expresions to determine which objects.

All of this might be a crazy idea but it sounds potentially really cool to me. What you guys thinkabout this?

Andreu

[LaidlawFX]

With houdini fx you can make tools that have dynamics and pops in them for use in houdini, but these tool are kind of useless if you can not press the resimulate button because it is locked. This needs to be fixed or they shouldn't have this feature in houdini, useing daily build 12.5.398 and have used 12.5.316.22, windows 64 sadly.

opparm -c dopnet1 resimulate;

[Sifis]

Show code generated by selected nodes in VOPS. Right now we can view all code generated by network, check it one by one or just play with reconnecting parts of network to see it. It would be helpful with more complicated shaders when you decide to rewrite some parts etc.

Totally agree, right now when I want to see the output values of specific nodes I usually export an attribute called "debug" and open the details pane. I don't think it's the most elegant or quick way of checking what individual nodes are outputting.

[3__]

I would not mind if this would be directly integrated into the network view with the option to turn these nodes on/off. Houdini's nodes would then have to have the ability to expose their parameters in a VOP like fashion to wire them up. I could do a mockup if someone is interested.

something like this?

http://www.sidefx.com/components/com_forum/files/sop_ports__560.gif

For rigging this sort of thing would get very messy... maybe just show a dependency curve between nodes,then double-click on it to show the vops in a subnet, with inputs and outputs hosting the available parameters of the connected nodes.

[anim]

...

I would not mind if this would be directly integrated into the network view with the option to turn these nodes on/off. Houdini's nodes would then have to have the ability to expose their parameters in a VOP like fashion to wire them up. I could do a mockup if someone is interested.

...

...For rigging this sort of thing would get very messy... maybe just show a dependency curve between nodes,then double-click on it to show the vops in a subnet, with inputs and outputs hosting the available parameters of the connected nodes.

I would not prefer this to be in the same network view since many times you want to connect parameters/transforms between nodes in different networks/contexts, or even parameters on the same node

This thing is very useful though and it can be separate context where you can fetch parameters/transforms of any node and export to any other node (just like below mentioned systems do) of course with proper dependency checks (in Houdini closest to this functionality are CHOPs in time slice mode, but they are just for floats, so it's pain to deal with matrices in VOP CHOP)

I can also imagine it being based on VOPs since VOPs can share many nodes with this context

being it separate context has even advantages of allowing user to build many different connections as an assets (like constraints or whatever) and then reuse them for different objects or easily disable etc...

...

All of this might be a crazy idea but it sounds potentially really cool to me. What you guys thinkabout this?

...

not crazy at all, as it was mentioned Modo works this way, Maya's hypergraph as well, Cinema4D's expresso, Softimage's ICE (at least for xforms), ... so why not add this to Houdini?

Edited May 12, 2013 by anim