Houdini 19 Wishlist

[abvfx]

On 18/11/2019 at 10:14 AM, Njordy said:

3. Texture painting. Hear me out, nobody expects Mari/Substance  level of painting, it's not for that. But a lot of times it's beneficial to paint something basic and not be dependant on topology. For example: I don't wanna go into painting app just to put a few tiny dots and the cat's face in order for fur to be colored by it later.

In the feature list in the sneak peak there is something listed you might like. 

 

Paint Sop is now stroke based. It's independent of resolution. 

If I would suggest something. It would be more options for animators to streamline their workflow and have quality of life changes. No point having amazingly low level control for TDs and riggers if no one animates in the software. Can we wean people off Maya?

 

Apart from that I love what sesi are doing 

[rayman]

An option to turn off weight normalization when painting capture weights using Capture Layer Paint, so we can use smooth and reduce paint modes without the need to fix the unwanted weights produced by it. Post normalization is fine. Interactive one feels like maya in 1999 when it modifies all bone weights when trying to paint only one of them - it is even worse as there is no user friendly bone weights lock.

[McNistor]

Yes, unfortunately Houdini does feel pre-2000s era in this sector. Houdini lacks an exhaustive weights editor, some of the tools are confusing and/or don't produce reliable and repeatable results. Mirror Capture SOP for example, is a mess in this regard and also it's very confusing in its documentation, for mea at least - none of the listed modes in the Behavior list, docs explanations or behavior in the viewport, make practical sense to me. The approach of "from" and "to" lists of bones/deformers has less interactivity than a command line. So we're pre-1980s here. The only better thing in Houdini vs XSI (again, a defunct software that had this nailed since at least 15 yrs ago) is its initial capture result with its biharmonic solution.

And there are other problems related to character animation work, which I mentioned with other occasions and won't do it again here.

[AntoineSfx]

A coordinate field in Curve SOP that would like more like Add SOP / points  or the geometry spreadsheet.

It's user unfriendly to edit in its current form, unless you edit it in the geometry spreadsheet, which can be confusing (SOP becomes frozen, and you have 2 different sets of coordinates.)

 

[AlSk]

Dark mode for the documentation.

[animatrix]

7 hours ago, AlSk said:

Dark mode for the documentation.

Funny I just submitted this a few days ago. So far the best bet is to use the dark reader extension for the external help which is the not perfect but it has its own pros.

[flcc]

I wish sideFX introduce some sort of global variable in VEX.
This would avoid the use of a sop solver in many cases.

I suspect that if they didn't do it, they must have good reasons.
But since they are in a logic of reducing the back and forth between different contexts, this could be cool.

Edited December 12, 2019 by flcc

[ftaswin]

11 minutes ago, flcc said:

I wish sideFX introduce some sort of global variable in VEX.
This would avoid the use of a sop solver in many cases

What do you mean by this? You mean global like $F, $T? Because you can create a custom one and also accessible in wrangler

[flcc]

Sorry I was a bit unclear.
A variable that persists over time to be able to accumulate a value.
Be abble to write in a wrangler

global int count =0;
count++;
and at frame 4 you get count = 3; (What we're doing with sop solver for now.)

may be the correct term would be static ? (I'm not an expert

Edited December 12, 2019 by flcc

[ftaswin]

What about utilizing $F to achieve this?

fit($F,100,200, 1,999)

floor(($F-startFrame)/3) will increase a value by 1 every 3 frames.

floor(($F-startFrame)/10)*2  will double a value by every 10 frames.

I do this a lot with fake pop simulation. A lot you can do with animating $F variable without simulation

[Cockochan]

Export clouds, pyro, volumes, water to engines without much hassle

[flcc]

@cloud68

yes, the example was fairly simple but what if you want accumulate impredicatable datas or datas from another stream ?
All those things that make you have to use a sop solver, while in "classic", C style language you juste declare a variable global or static.

I know it's not recommended, but it's often very convenient.

 

[anicg]

Option to overlay the network editor over the viewport, just came across this in facebook:

 

[LaidlawFX]

4 hours ago, anicg said:

Option to overlay the network editor over the viewport, just came across this in facebook:

This is 100% needed.

[majinpu]

-Hydra GL should be more near to EVEE. DOF, improved reflections, etc... 

-Faster way to export flipbooks with export presets. It's always  been a pain to export previews!

[malexander]

6 hours ago, majinpu said:

-Hydra GL should be more near to EVEE. DOF, improved reflections, etc...

I'm guessing you're referring to our viewport renderer and not Pixar's Storm (formally known as HydraGL). DOF and motion blur are available through the flipbook currently. However this isn't a way to hook up realtime reflections in LOPs the way you can in objects.

Python presets are doable with HOM right now (FlipbookSettings), but I agree it should be more built-in. At least you can save them as default now

[sebkaine]

Bulletproof implicit UV for FLIP solver.

[bonassus]

Alright I've got one. On the file cache on the missing frame pull down can we have a last frame option along with the "error" and "no geometry" so i don't have to set up a switch every time? 

thanks

[Jesper Rahlff]

ability to save out flipbook holding all the rows and coloumns as one flipbook.

[Andrea]

Faster and easier way to setup passes (for example velocities) or other attributes, both for geometry and volumes. Ideally you just need to have the attribute on the geometry and the only thing you need to do is set it up as Extra Image Plane