Good stuff I miss from other software..

[Jason]

What about the ability to move in the X, Y or Y, Z or X, Z plain when using a handle in a perspective view.

Also to chose the coordinate space to move in, local, world, parent, screen

max's translation gismo in local coordinate space reddy to move in X, Y.

When I saw this post, I got all excited; because I had seen that they had done with exact thing before they released the public beta. So, if you haven't discovered it, this is available by Ctrl+clicking on any of the axes of the xform handle. A small square handle appears on the handle and you can drag that about.

Yippeee!

[daland]

On the compositing end of things,

I think sidefx should look into supporting plugins like gen-arts saphire, etc.

There was talk at NAB about a common plugin format for aftereffects, shake,

etc. It would be nice if COPs could take advantage of that as well..

that's my two cents..

david

[Jason]

Yes, that would be a great idea indeed. I don't see why COPs2 shouldn't be able to support it.

[daland]

ok one more suggestion on halo..

for smaller shops that dont have a flame (Oh how I miss my flame from

travelling pictures) I would like to see a 2D tracker. It would be

sooo handy to be able to track mattes and grads and such.

If sidefx really wants halo to stand up to other compositing packages,

a 2d tracker is a must in my opinion.

david

[daland]

....and if we had a simple 2d tracker, then we could take those coordinates and

maybe birth particles based on a tracked 2d plate... all within houdini..

mmmmmm I can almost taste it now!

david

[Lukich]

the tracker would be sweet. why not include the 3d tracker, as well? or maybe a more obvious way to import animation curves from other programs. also, that little maya feature where you can quickly switch between different shading modes - wireframe>solid>textured>lit

[sibarrick]

"w" toggles between wireframe and the last shaded mode you used.

The one small thing I really miss from MAX is the the ability for a soft radius to be specified by distance along edges rather than just as a radius from your start point.

Also, I love to see the the ability to add sops to multiple objects at the same time (without using a script). Specifically so you could add a edit sop to lots of geos at the same time, select points in all the pieces of geometry and tweak them all at the once with the same transform.

2D and 3D trackers - defo too.

The ability to add help to an op based on a VOP network. (Not that this is available in any other package anyway.... but it might be if they actually had VOPs)

The ability for Sesi to sell as many copies of Houdini as Alias sell of Maya so that I could easily get a job anywhere....

[TheDunadan]

Possibly the following things i miss in houdini are simply due to the fact i don't know houdini well enough yet, but here they are:

Interface changes that can be created nice and quickily with MEL. Generally some window i can put custom scripts on, easy creation of custom interfaces for more complex setups. The script editor (with echo all) was nice too, to see what maya is doing.

The ramp node as in maya. I liked being able to change the interpolation type for each input,... generally the hypershade seemed a bit more intuitive for me than the vex builder. I liked as well more the connection editor for connecting in- and outputs, the direct feedback in these lil mini-prerendered preview icons.... Well, likely i just have to get used to it.

Rigid body dynamics:i just couldn't find it in houdini, but i would prefer having a choice on solver type (runge-kutta, euler ...), error tollerance etc. The dynamic relation ship editor is pretty useful as well.

Oh, and i think the maya help is better, specially if you want to quickly browse for existing commands/functions ...

[aracid]

hey Guys

i dunno if im missing something, but it doesnt seem like mantra supports anything like a glow ??

theres something posted that the new mantra doesnt support glows??

if this is true,

would be nice if they reintroduced it!

[Mcronin]

Sure it does, you can make your own shaders and you have a built in compositor, you can make a myriad of different glow effects. I've ported at least three variations on a "glow" shader from Renderman into Mantra.

If you are looking for a button to press that will make an object glow... Nope, sorry, I haven't seen that feature in Houdini

In the Renderman Companion there's a very simple glow shader that's easily ported to Houdini and you might find various versions of "Fakey Glow" for Renderman on the net you could port. I'm pretty sure there's a compositing video tutorial over at Vislab that teaches you how to do glows in post...

[lynbo]

Lets see yes most of what I wanted seems to be showing up in v7 but...

The biggest thing for me would be import / export stuff, so I could

get stuff from other packages in, do cool stuff to it, and then get stuff

out again.

Render Passes similar to XSI perhaps.

Hotbox style control so you could flip into any mode or prameter page or network editor or whatnot from a maximized 3D viewer.

Ability to render with Mental Ray right out of Houdini. This may be possible

but I've no idea how. MI files and script a command to call a command line eor it or something? Ok so one idea. (not very good though)

If I wish real hard mabey interactive render regions in the viweport( with Mental Ray).

I saw this somewhere and cannot rember how to do it but I think it is possible to do Interactive render region with mantra. ( if anyone

knows how let me know pls.)

Contextual (right click in view) Poly tools like edge loop or poly loop for selection and editing.

[renderpipe]

Ability to render with Mental Ray right out of Houdini. This may be possible

but I've no idea how. MI files and script a command to call a command line eor it or something? Ok so one idea. (not very good though)

I'm not expert. Actually I'm newbie but I think you need to set environment variables for path to mental ray then then for the ROP command change it from ray to ray3 if you are using modern version of mental ray. I think there is some better info if you search this site. This is where I get my information from and I also have mental ray book (made for rocket scientists;)

I also study xsi in my spare time so if you are using mental ray from xsi, try launching houdini from SI command prompt and then maybe you can just type ray3 from Mental Ray ROP without setting environment variables since SI command prompt "should" do this for you. Me thinks?

Also you need Houdini Master license and you need standalone mental ray license. Me thinks again.

I saw this somewhere and cannot rember how to do it but I think it is possible to do Interactive render region with mantra. ( if anyone

knows how let me know pls.)

You have to enter a render state.

tab->Generic->render

Now draw a region to render in the viewport

Also we have edgeloop tool. I only know because I learn it today!

Perry

[mark]

btw edgeloop tools are outlined in the Wiki

[digitallysane]

Seems that people really want / need a powerful render pass workflow in Houdini...

Dragos

[Jason]

Seems that people really want / need a powerful render pass workflow in Houdini...

Dragos

Very true, this would be incredibly useful.