Houdini 14 Wishlist

[Alexey Vanzhula]

No one:) But maya has better class\members description

[LaidlawFX]

Yup - but first I want an updated Color Picker 

amen to that... I'm happy there are more icons in h13, the little things make you happy the most.

[sanostol]

A way to blend two complete materials, with a map, for example You have a material with rust and one for metal and want to blend it with a map. One way could be that if You collapse one material network in a subnetwork inside the shader You can add  prefixes to the parameters with the subnetwork, so if You duplicate that subnetwork and change the prefix You have to complete controlable shaders in on.

not sure if this is hard to do, but I think combining two  materials is already possible but very tedious, as You have to rename tons of parameters, for example the mantrasurface material, but with two subnetworks each containing a material network, but getting its parameters "prefixed" it would be much easier, maybe adding a option to add folders for subnetworks would be great, too

[sebkaine]

I agree Martin, i've always hate shaders with a monolitic bloc architecture. When you start to be picky about what you want you end up with heavy stuff.  Arnold / Vray / Mantra has all adopted this monolitic style, while many people love to have this all in one fashion of organize things, i've always find that the Renderman Artist Tool logic (NOT the RMS ) with the shading models that you combine in a Delux was great. At the time nobody care about PBR and that was the weakness of the Delux, you end up with 2 diffuse + 2 specs and a happy unphysical mess that looks cool etc... Now Maxwell shading system is really the new RAT followers. I have never see something as brillant and clever. The system is extremely simple your start with elementary BSDF and you can combine them as you wish by keeping a physically correct workflow. You also have a tons of prebuild material with PBR properties. That's why i only use mantra now has an FX engine (it is a killer in this task ).  But i find maxwell far better for PBR stuff.

- with mantra shader you have very few flexibility by default and high complexity if you want to get this flexiblity

- in maxwell you are extremely flexible by default and the level of complexity is extremely LOW

 

SESI should have a look on this BSDF combination system. and no i am not making a commercial for Maxwell on a public SESI Forum

Edited March 25, 2014 by sebkaine

[saelly]

import scipy

import matplotlib

[LaidlawFX]

I agree Martin, i've always hate shaders with a monolitic bloc architecture. When you start to be picky about what you want you end up with heavy stuff.  Arnold / Vray / Mantra has all adopted this monolitic style, while many people love to have this all in one fashion of organize things, i've always find that the Renderman Artist Tool logic (NOT the RMS ) with the shading models that you combine in a Delux was great. At the time nobody care about PBR and that was the weakness of the Delux, you end up with 2 diffuse + 2 specs and a happy unphysical mess that looks cool etc... Now Maxwell shading system is really the new RAT followers. I have never see something as brillant and clever. The system is extremely simple your start with elementary BSDF and you can combine them as you wish by keeping a physically correct workflow. You also have a tons of prebuild material with PBR properties. That's why i only use mantra now has an FX engine (it is a killer in this task ).  But i find maxwell far better for PBR stuff.

- with mantra shader you have very few flexibility by default and high complexity if you want to get this flexiblity

- in maxwell you are extremely flexible by default and the level of complexity is extremely LOW

 

SESI should have a look on this BSDF combination system. and no i am not making a commercial for Maxwell on a public SESI Forum

 

All that SESI really needs to do is reorganize the SHOP level concept for this, and create some nice presets and shaders... will they do this is a hope I've been waiting on way too long. The internal architecture is all there for sure, def proven that time and again. It's kind of sad that they haven't hired a decent UI artist and shader writer to update this section to be competitive with Maxwell, Vray, Modo, 3ds Max MR, and the likes. Standard presets of metals, and materials in a simple formula would make a world of different. I miss how Max and Modo ship with a standard texture library so you can do architectural out of the box.

[sebkaine]

I agree Ben all the tools are there , they just need to be repack in a more flexible / user friendly way

[sanostol]

-A little item like the browse or the jumpto arrow beside the material, but one that opens the linked node's parameter in a floating window, best would be if it would be optional in the parameter layout. often I don't want to jumb to the material but just inspect it's properties

 

 

animation plotting would be great, for example I have a animation in chops, and at some point I want to really make hand animated changes on a fitted curve,( one that has a reasonable amount of keys, not a key on every frame), maybe the splineCHOP could get some more love

[Erik_JE]

from PySide import QtCore, QtGui

 

Nuff said.

[edward]

-A little item like the browse or the jumpto arrow beside the material, but one that opens the linked node's parameter in a floating window, best would be if it would be optional in the parameter layout. often I don't want to jumb to the material but just inspect it's properties

 

I think Ctrl+LMB on the jump button did that? (or was it some other modifier key?)

[magneto]

I think Ctrl+LMB on the jump button did that? (or was it some other modifier key?)

 

Great tip Edward I wish the popup windows appeared on top of Houdini though. I know this seem to happen only on Windows but it seems to happen to me all the time. So after opening a dialog like Display Options, I have to use WinKey + Right Arrow 3 times for the window to be moved to another monitor but also appear on top correctly.

[sebkaine]

In the ROP section :

- addition of the PYTHON node (The same as in SOP) to lunch agnostic Python in a ROP tree

- enhancement of the SHELL node with the possibility to enter many lines of codes like in the Wrangle and Python nodes

- again ability to create DOT like in nuke beetween connections in the nodal tree.

Edited March 31, 2014 by sebkaine

[MENOZ]

Hello people, for DOT like in nuke, I would say, make the NULL node behave and look different so it can be easier to use and place.

for example

-The null node can look like it is now, but has options where you can choose to: show or not the name, make it look like a dot so it takes less space.

-It has various shortcuts for its creation, for example the name to be OUT_incomingNode, or if a multiple selection is made choose if merge/switch or create a null under each selection. and it obviously can be created on fly like nuke, without typing anything and just pressing on wires.

 

 

-I think wires should be selectable and be deleted with canc.

-A way to show the name of connected node if outside of network view. I propose to have a shortcut like holding shift and hovering wires with mouse, this would highlight the current wire, a sort of preselection, and shows input and output node names (with the option to show statistics as well)

 

 

what do you think?

[edward]

I know this seem to happen only on Windows but it seems to happen to me all the time.

 

I think the best thing to is to send in bug reports with reproducible steps

[sanostol]

Cool thing to have for character rigs would be that kind of selection You see in this video at 46:00

http://www.twitch.tv/nvidia/b/514486710

van gelder just picks on the deformed mesh and the control gets selected, would make rigs much cleaner.

not sure how this would work best, right now I would think of merging in that part of the mesh as custom shape, but not sure if this is a clever idea for a complicated rig with many controls and draws a lot of performance

[LaidlawFX]

The cookie sop to cut as cleanly as the clip sop and voronoi fracture sop.

I want to use the break sop and thusly the cookie sop to make custom cuts for rbd, but the polygon jitter associated with it makes me have to be creative with the clip and voronoi to get clean cuts. It seems extremely silly that the math for a clean boolean is so hard.

[bandini]

Would love this technique added to Houdini:

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/19434-edge-displacement-on-fractured-pieces/page-5

[krautsourced]

I wholeheartedly agree. Don't get me wrong, power to those who can but, I'm more of a generalist on the artist side rather than the programming side. When SideFX's tutorials went into wrangle nodes and VEX expressions, my eyes started to gloss over. I'm learning Python and general programing, implementing it as projects see fit but, slow going overall. I actually chose to learn Houdini after being disgruntled with Autodesks practices. No regrets there but from the recent talk on the official forums about Softimage, makes me wish I got to learn XSI and ICE, as it was touted as more artist friendly. Ironically started it all in Softimage|3D.

 

Agree again with Node bloat and multiple languages. It's prime time to make Houdini more artist friendly and maybe shake off that TD Centric image a bit.

 

Regarding the wrangle nodes, I couldn't disagree more (but I understand where you're coming from, our artist's eyes are glossing over just like yours). To me, the wrangle nodes were a godsend, since I absolutely hated having to do calculations with countless nodes strung together, where a single line of text would do. The power to just drop a piece of code into your node based workflow, without having to deal with all the hassle that usually surrounds coding for an app (compiling, setting up environments, dealing with APIs that are required, but have nothing to do with what you actually want to achieve...) is one of the things that makes Houdini so strong for TDs.

[fxrod]

Why wouldn't anyone want the following? Seems these are standard everyday things that are amiss.

1. Ability to rotate pyro domain. Why are we bound to axis-aligned domains? I know, I know... Object Position, Copy Data, bla, bla, blah. But why it gotta be so hard?
2. Camera frustum caching.
3. Built in edge noise for voronoi. Seem some really cool stuff going on here in the forums.
4. Easier way to import geometry from DOPs. The syntax is hairy. Admit it everyone!

[ikarus]

It would be nice to have an updated sph solver using one of the newer more efficient/stable models ie implicit incompressible sph or pci-sph.  They don't seem incredibly complicated to implement, but yet again I'm not a computational programmer...  There are just some things that flip cannot emulate very well.