new poll?

[Koyotemohn]

requests for version 5.5-->6:

more how to's/why to's. like how to make our own area lights. like how to make more advanced shaders. like taking the obscurity out of chops, which is own of the things that really sets houdini apart from other packages. ...problem is that chops needs to reexplained and redefined over and of again. two reasons: its not just for character animators. its for effects animators.

more advanced conceptual tutorials. houdini users coming from other software packages need to feel confident that they can make they houdin images easily have a better final appearance than other renderer's

smarter interact pop. like realflow's particles. dont get me wrong. houdini's particle system is incredible, on the whole. its just certain system's like the interact pop can be beefed up.

edge loop and edge ring tools: like select edge ring and bevel edge or edge loop

slide vertice along edge

slide edge along edge

double checking the nurbs modelling tools like the boolean sop. what a crummy tool until the cookie sop came back.

reassessing the means by which one convert from metaballs to polygons. that needs to be beefed up if fluid sims are going to be a part of houdini.

constantly enhance the interface. dajuice is right. seeing houdini from the start til now was made on user contribution and critique.interface enhancements improve the focus of the user to be kept on the accomplishing the task at hand. that cant be underestimated.

[TheUsualAlex]

ability to translate 2 axis at the same time.

[stevenong]

ability to translate 2 axis at the same time.

Hey Alex,

Do you mean translating in say, both X & Y axis? Just switch to the Front ortho viewport & drag the centre of the handle.

Or did I completely misunderstand you?

Cheers!

steven

[miguel m]

I think Alex refers to being able to move along any two axes of the handle.

Maybe a solution can be to have some new handy construction plane commands, like "home on selected geometry" and such, but with the construction plane also adapting its orientation to the selected object.

[miguel m]

In the same vein as alex's suggestion... how about being able to select two whatever transformations and then have houdini assing one to each axis of mouse movement? For example holding shift you can select multiple transforms (str), only the last two are kept, like when doing orientation picking.

It could be useful when doing several polyextrudes, you have ty in the vertical mouse movement and rx in the horizontal. That makes it vey fast to create new polys and position them.

btw, What do you think about the implementation of rotation handles? I'd prefer to grab a rotation handle, then move the mouse vertically or horizontally. Now the handle kind of "looks at" the mouse pointer making it very difficult to use when the rot handle you want to use is nearly perpendicular to the camera plane, and also makes the relation between how much you move the mouse and how much the handle rotates non linear.

Maybe rotating a knob this way in a music program makes sense because the plane of rotation is always aligned to the screen. But still most of them use the pick-drag instead of the "pick-move yer mouse in circles dude"

[betty]

*"good" documentation!!!

*saving poses in the "pose state" and being able to refer to those poses at any time during animation or being able to import into CHOPS

*ability to use the magnetSOP/softTransformSOP or likewise operation on ik chains, and defining a fall-off......ie, temporarily reassigning the root of the ik chain.

*maybe the solution to these ik, skeleton suggestions may be to have a skeleton under one object and have all the hierchy in SOPS. This way you can "model" your skeleton, i think this could be more intuitive and faster. I have been fooling around with skeletons and don't understand why all bones have their own object space. maybe somebody could explain this to me? Under SOPS you would then have all those SOPS at your disposal for manipulating the bones

*easier/better hair solutions, ( maybe they are easy? maybe i need the documentation to tell me how easy it really is? ).

*cloth

*2D+3D paint tool, again maybe it's all there? like using the attributeSOP to access all your needs via the paintSOP...but i don't really see it

*and really tweaking that interactPOP really sounds like a good idea, in many ways i'm suprised they haven't as the POPS is such a great foundation to push particle simulations further than what it has so far.

*metaball to be able to take the shape of any chosen geometry shape

*refined modeling workflow, eg - using the construction plane, i don't understand why i can't use the references on the geometry being modeled to define the parameters of the plane, rather than having to bring up the construction plane and position it there,... too slow. i also can't even see the construction plane in orthographic view, even when the handle is on.

[danteA]

Hi Betty,

*ability to use the magnetSOP/softTransformSOP or likewise operation on ik chains, and defining a fall-off......ie, temporarily reassigning the root of the ik chain.

Are you talking about for deformations? I think you can do something like this right now with some work. Not sure what you mean by "temporarily reassigning the root of the ik chain" though. I've haven't tried this but I have an idea that I think should work. Bone objects themselves own geometry. This means that if you go down into the SOP level inside a Bone object, you can place a metaball inside which will then go along for the ride when the bone moves. You don't even have to connect it to anything. You can use & animate these metaballs as "controllers". To make these metaballs affect your captured geometry, you use an Object Merge to merge in all the metaballs of your bones and pipe them into a Bulge SOP along with the output of the Deform SOP. The will let you animate the bones and use the metaballs inside them as deformers.

*metaball to be able to take the shape of any chosen geometry shape

This would be cool. Sorta tying this with the point above. Instead of metaballs, you should be able to use "arbitrary" shaped deformers by substituting the metaballs inside your bones with specially modeled deformer geometry instead. After that, you can use the "points" option of the Lattice SOP to deform your skin.

dante

[betty]

Hi dante

What i mean is to actually be able to play with the ik tools such as,

say a skeleton is in the simple straight up hands out horizontally to the sides.

i then choose the ikgoal on the left hand, if i have a magnet effect on this, all bones/points/goals - ( the user will specify ) will be effected within the fall-off region, not only the bones which are associated from the original skeletal set-up. this is what i mean if the bones could be treated like points/edges/primitives in SOPS. You could then switch into a magnetSOP and the bones would be effected in this way, if you are not in any SOP but the neutral view state well the bones behave like the original set-up intended.

Imagine doing bones for tentacle and you want changes to how many bones are in the tentacle, well what if i could use a resampleSOP to adjust the number/lenth of bones. I'm sure all sorts of things could be done with bones as they now are it's just that i'm just so new to them, but i am experimenting.

I'd like to know what others think about this, maybe this is all doable already or outrageously stupid???

*how about auto keyframing, is that already there? i don't want to be hitting alt-k or lmb on the green/red light in the bottom right hand corner. just to simply toggle auto keyframing on and when i make a change at whatever keyframe i am at, it will automatically be adjusted.

[miguel m]

hey betty, that's a very mirai-ish approach

[TheUsualAlex]

Hi Betty, Auto-keying is in fact exist in Houdini. Go to Edit>Preferences>General and check "Add Keyframes on parameter change".

Cheers.

[betty]

miguel m : "hey betty, that's a very mirai-ish approach " -

yeah it is, i was using mirai before switching over to Houdini and really miss some of the features in mirai - which i think are very simple, intuitive and very powerful....and i also still think in this manner ( i suppose because it really keyed in to the way i work/think ). the thing is when i look at houdini i just think Houdini would be able to really take those concepts to much greater levels because of the great depth it has,

alex : thanks for that, i actually looked there and missed it - should have looked harder......

[sirogi]

more advanced conceptual tutorials. houdini users coming from other software packages need to feel confident that they can make they

houdin images easily have a better final appearance than other renderer's

yep, I heart that concern sooo many times!....

fact is mantra IS a cool renderer...just takes the "know how" to get the most out of it...

certain system's like the interact pop can be beefed up.

edge loop and edge ring tools

reassessing the means by which one convert from metaballs to polygons. that needs to be beefed up if fluid sims are going to be a part of houdini.

constantly enhance the interface.

that's a quadruple AMEN, brother!....

I'm also confident that, if the progression form 4 to 5 is any indication, things are gonna get better....

[Guest Guest_betty]

i really don't know much about the technical aspects, but how does full intergration with renderman sound? the way say mental ray is intergrated in xsi. now we have VOPS so getting the shaders together shouldn't be so bad and houdini is already part of the way there. probably would be a huge selling point as well. and when with global illumination and raytraycing coming up in the next release it sounds like a dream.

how feasible would this be?

[TheUsualAlex]

Heh. Renderman is tightly integrated into Houdini already. Just need the Rman Shader output from VOP would be great.

[Jason]

Don't think that'll be happen - at least not written by Side Effects.

It's up to Pixar to write one - hell, even do a sort of port of MTOR to Houdini would be sufficient, except that MTOR is deep in bed with MEL and TCL. I would like to see it, though...

J.