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Houdini/Halo vs. Maya/Shake?


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Hi there,

this is my first post on this forum, so be gentle. :D

I was given the enjoyable task to set up a small (make that tiny ;)) postproduction studio and am currently evaluating soft-/hardware solutions.

Being a Maya guy, i did some of the 3dBuzz tutorials for Houdini a while back and was amazed about its 100 percent node-based, non-destructive workflow. No history slowing down a scene, no "point of no return", no hidden nodes you can't get rid off anymore. :)

Having some money to burn, i'm actually thinking whether Houdini Master would be a viable alternative to the Maya/Shake combo. I was just playing around with Halo in the apprentice edition and was amazed how nice it fits into the workflow. I nearly wet myself when i figured you could actually relight a scene using Surface Normals in the comp!!

There's still a few questions left though:

1: learning curve. i'd have to estimate the time necessary to "relearn". example: i'm an experienced Maya user - how fast could i start being as productive with Houdini? (weeks, months?)

2: is there any (easy) way to render dynamic hair similar to Shave and a Haircut or Maya Hair?

3: How complete is Halo? I didn't find any paint tools and a keyer seems to be missing too. Are there any useful color correction tools similar to the discreet line?

4: Do i need to licence Renderman or is it included in the package already?

---------

What do you guys think? Is Houdini Master a viable option or just an expensive addition to an existing pipeline? Can Halo be compared to Shake at all?

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yo maelstrom

wierd no one answering ur question.

I was given the enjoyable task to set up a small (make that tiny ) postproduction studio and am currently evaluating soft-/hardware solutions

What sorta work are u focusing on in ur studio?

(i think that answer alone and ur budget mostly determine what u gonna be using.)

If its FX based, and for commercials or Features, alias would have to pay me not to use houdini.

How many artists are u gonna have?

4: Do i need to licence Renderman or is it included in the package already?

it isnt distrubuted in with houdini, but is fully integrated, but not something u get when u buy it.

It does have mantra, which is really good, and offers u alot (custom shaders, micropoly rendering, good displacement, point instancing, GI, caustics bla bla bla, and that can network render).

1: learning curve. i'd have to estimate the time necessary to "relearn". example: i'm an experienced Maya user - how fast could i start being as productive with Houdini? (weeks, months?)
Thats a difficult answer because theres not nearly as much learning material for houdini when compared to maya, so on that angle, its tough especially if u havent got anyone to just turn around and ask stupid questions but never the less, documentation supplied with it is really good and forums can help u with alot. in terms of time, who knows, its not increadibly difficult(coming from maya) in fact im glad i started on maya and migrated to houdini. However i dont think that NASA has monkeys playing in houdini before they are sent up into space :blink:

I cant answer number 2 and 3 because as for halo, i like it, but i still turn to shake for final comps, even though i do alot of my 2d work in halo. maybe its just habit ;) and as for hair, im sure sidefx has something up their slieve, and when it is released, people are going to ask "whats shave and hair cut again"?

read up on what they doing with cloth and RBD, and im sure u'll agree.

anyways, hope this helps

cheers for now

aracid

:blink:

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thx for your feedback, it's very much appreciated! :)

unfortunately, having to wait 2 days for someone to answer a basic question told me almost enough. i love Houdini for its logical, non-destructive approach and i'm dedicated to dig into it some more, but it seems the community is just too small.

we're gonna have three 3d seats for starters, concentrating on commerical works and character animation. some basic motiondesign for tv on top of that.

although i really liked to, i can't justitfy the use of Houdini at this point. we won't have enough learning ressources, not enough freelance artists available for those tight deadlines... there's no viable hair solution and Halo apparently can't compare to a full fledged compositing suite yet. we're not going to specialise in particles either so from a cost/value point of view SideFX is not getting another customer (yet).

we got a good deal from our local apple representative and will order 3 top range G5s with Maya Unlimited/Shake to boot, connected via fiber optics to an Xserve Raid.

hehe, i someone would have told me i'd gonna build an apple pipeline 2 years ago, i would have called him mad.... :P

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unfortunately, having to wait 2 days for someone to answer a basic question told me almost enough. i love Houdini for its logical, non-destructive approach and i'm dedicated to dig into it some more, but it seems the community is just too small.

14259[/snapback]

This is true - its a small community - but a close one. I think that posts like "compare this to that" are posts no-one really wants to answer anyway, hence the delay. :) You don't often have to wait long when you have production/technical questions.

That said, you will never be more closely supported by another software vendor as you will by Side Effects. As a paying customer you have the capaibilty to download a DAILY build of the software - no waiting 3 months to get a .1 version up which doesn't even fix your problems. You have access to bug lists and developement journals so that you know almost exactly what is going into the daily build.

Where are you located, by the way?

I guess money talks if you're getting a good deal and best of luck in your endeavours. B)

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That said, you will never be more closely supported by another software vendor as you will by Side Effects. As a paying customer you have the capaibilty to download a DAILY build of the software - no waiting 3 months to get a .1 version up which doesn't even fix your problems.

14260[/snapback]

that sounds really tempting... i'm not happy about a lot of things in Maya and from a personal standing point i'd love to switch. but as you said: money talks indeed :(

we're based in Switzerland, there's no "industry" yet, just a few small postproduction houses. how many people are using Houdini at Digital Domain? i guess you got plenty of knowledge/experience yourself and some fellow artists to discuss problems if needed.

that is my biggest concern: not having enough ressources/contacts to get help, resulting in additional downtime on top of switching apps. we have to maximise our productivity from start and these concerns really put a dent into my personal preferences.

i find it funny, the other Maya/Houdini thread discussing modeling workflow gets plenty of attention, whereas people don't seem to be interested in Halo much at all.

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Hi,

your problem concerning switching maya <--> houdini, sounds just all too familiar :unsure:

A friend of mine who runs a smaller studio with 5 - 10 3d seats has to face similar problems. On the one hand side, there are many a good reason for houdini and he's tempted to switch, yet there are good reasons for staying with Maya. Mainly it's a matter of knowing he'd likely have to spent ~3 month on houdini before he might actually work more effeciently and has found a convinient solution to all those everyday tasks. Secondly over the past years there is this little folder with all those smaller neat tools and scripts he got used and that would need some reworking. And finally with changing projects the number of employed/required 3d artists changes just as well and finding proficient "houdini freelancers" in europe doesn't seem easy either. :(

But not all is lost, houdini escape is fairly low-priced and buying a license or two isn't such a heavy decision (compared to Houdini Master at least ;)) and if the deadline on a smaller project isn't very tight we'll give houdini a try.

Concerning Renderman, you'll likely have found out by now you need a extra license for Prman, AIR or whatever renderman-compliant renderer you have in mind. However Houdini's Mantra seems a much more valid choice than Maya's default renderer and allows to get used to RSL, since VEX is fairly familiar and shaders can be converted to Prman shaders easily. The good support of deep rasters / floating point precision rendering output and network rendering capabilities tops it all and I believe I read somewhere that sidefx usually adds a few extra mantra render licences to every houdini license (if you don't have a master license for unlimited render licences anyhow).

On hair solutions; it's a long time since I last gave shave & haircut a chance but it was far from perfect (rib export took ages and native rendering was fairly slow + came with a quite a few restrictions). The new Maya dynamic curves seem a really good addition for many things but hair; you need to render it seperatly anyhow (--> need to add it in the post anyhow, doesn't matter much if you'd to it with a seperate tool) and the simulation has a somewhat "unstable" tendency. I remeber all too well having setup a simulation/rendering over a weekend (all tests seemed fairly good so far) and when I arrived on monday and watched the ouput with the deadline drawing nearer I knew I'd need a few extra mugs of strong coffee in the upcoming days/nights: We virtually had to babysit the simulation/rendering. Would like to know if you had more positive production experience with Maya's new Hair system.

Starting to trail of the initial subject, but on Maya to Mental Ray: raytracing-heavy scenes render really fast, but the batch rendering crashed almost constantly every 30 frames and a few single frames wouldn't render at all for some obscure reason, quite a few shader networks of maya won't translate (basically every time you have any expressions involved --> e.g. distance driven shaders just don't work) etc. And Maya 6.0 came as well with quite a few nice surprises (like the +/- would crash the program once you switched from "+" mode to "-"). From what I read so far on Houdini it seems fairly robust/reliable and doesn't start crashing in the most inconvinient moments. After this one production I'm referring to everyone felt as if he just aged for 10 years in the final weeks of the project: The stability alone might be a good reason for Houdini.

Anyhow, even if for misc reasons you cannot afford to go houdini now, consider building up a nice linux pipeline + maybe a G5 with shake for compositing (compared to a single linux shake license you virtually get the G5 for free with an mac shake license if I'm not mistaken), get your maya licences + houdini escape.

Jens

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@TheDunadan

5-10 exclusive 3d seats? that's still considered a "small" studio in Germany? from my short experiences working there, i would have guessed it's already "medium"... :huh:

anyway, very good response. i haven't been using Maya Hair on a real production yet, we also tend to go the Shave and a Haircut route. And yes it's renders slow, but at least setup and simulation is pretty straightforward. Not good to hear about the stabilty issues of dynamic curves... :( for me, that was the biggest selling point for an Unlimited licence.

we'll be probably running G5's exclusively for networking reasons and ease of maintenance. if we get at least 2 compositing seats, it's no point setting up linux boxes because of Apples Shake price plan.

Mental Ray implementation in Maya is still flawed, i've been looking for viable alternatives for a while. Turtle was a hope, but it blows on network rendering... Renderman still seems to be the way to go, but for the not-so-technically minded artist i'm curious how the Renderman for Maya plugin will turn out. What can you say about AIR?

Is there a site i can see top notch Mantra renders? I might end up learning Houdini for personal reasons and it sure would help my motivation to see there's actually Houdini work out there ;)

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Hey Maelstrom

Master comes with unlimited mantra licenses as well as the ever wonderful particle systems. It also has built in supprt for renderman & mentalray (and any other prman compliant renderer).

Cheers

Marc

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Also, Master has COPS (Halo) integrated, where if you buy Escape and Halo seperately you have to run them as seperate programs. And Master has a more complete installation of CHOPs and will include DOPs (Dynamic Operators) when it is finally released. DOPs is going to be a HUGE deal in my opinion.

But remember, the unlimited render nodes of Mantra is a big deal. For a small shop with a render farm, one full license of Master and the rest Escape licenses (which can use all the tools/OTLs created in Master even without having POPs, etc.) could prove much cheaper than a Maya/Mental Ray solution and you don't have to pay the salary for a Mel programmer.

I also think being able to render to Deep Rasters and then composite with them in Halo is a big plus over using Shake or Combustion or whatever due to savings in simplicity and render times. I just wish Halo had some of the nice features of Shake and Combustion like tracking, movie (AVI, QT) support, and some of the other tools that ease the pain of video and film production.

Cheers,

Craig

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