3dbeing Posted March 15, 2007 Share Posted March 15, 2007 Yes, I think it a little unfair to start comparing the first version of dynamics in houdini, to something that's been around for awhile, like maya's dynamics. I will reserve my judgement of M vs H dynamics untill after 9, I have worked with both quite a bit, as well as realFlow, and I will just say... I am waiting for H9 to make my decision on H dynamics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beeemtee Posted March 19, 2007 Share Posted March 19, 2007 hi, first of all i'm very new in the Houdini world, since i use Maya since v1.0 for work. but i was so frustrated by the limited aproach of proceduralism in M, that in these days i put a lot of effort into make the switch. Sadly the main question in production is productiveness, and i'm yet slower and more limited in H to ask my bosses to buy a licence, but these efforts are bringing true delight into my life, since H is so, so good. so what i want to say is that i really like SESIs long time strategy with DAs, and i also think that this can be a winning strategy on the long run. Maya was really-really promising in the beginning, i switched from PowerAnimator and that time it was a relief in my life. But later, while i don't want to confute the existence of development, things went in the opposite direction than i expected. Alias started to put good sounding features into the software while serious things was missing or simply buggy. The unfortunate and otherwise natural thing was that the foundig also wasn't perfect. It was the best in it's time but there is simply no such thing as perfect software. Slowly under the lots of layers built uppon this foundation the deeper aspects of the software become rigid in these sence, and stopped evolving. Maybe i'm just not right with this, but i feel this way. My need is a CLEAN, COHERENT and as LESS BUGGY application as possible, and H seems to be much closer to that in the present days. And i think it's not without reason. It's the result of SESI's strategy. Let me point out that it's also very uncommon in the SW world that an old player starts to challenge a young(er) and strong(er) (at least in market share) competitor. SESI is doing something in the good way.. I think SESI wants to concentrate on the foundation, and they try not to flood the app with more production dependent features. That's what DAs for. It puts a bit more pressure and responsibility on the community to develop such features, but they are working on the FEATURES which allow us to do so easely. Every available quality DA puts the value of H higher, and makes life easier for other users and for SESI who can spend it's most valuable time on developing the real magic underneath. I think it's also possible to apply open source practices on this. That are very similar to what happens here at odforce, and at exchange. Sorry guys for the lots of words.. But i needed to say those, because i think it's a very good thing, and i'm quiet happy about it. Thanks for the great site, and the good company! with best regards bmt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tstex Posted May 1, 2007 Share Posted May 1, 2007 Don't you think the interactivity of the solver they present in the video is very impressive? You can't get that with houdini. It's fast on their demo computer thats for sure. Lets try and imagine the configuration of premier autodesk demo hardware... What will it run like on my workstation I wonder? Still probably pretty fast - but like others have pointed out - how much of a black box is it? How will long will it take the average artist or TD to pick up the Maya API hooks needed to create variants for differing shot needs across multiple sequences and shows? Will the short term output, and long term applicability of that variant to other tasks justify the expense involved in its development? If the answer is yes - then you are making the same movie over and over again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted May 1, 2007 Share Posted May 1, 2007 a good friend of mine made most (all?) of those demos... it's funny...he said that he has some sort of mega-super-computer with like, a bazillion GB of ram etc etc...it's so fast that when he was making the demos he'd have to stop and load them on his laptop just to make sure they still worked on 'normal' hardware...lol... that said, every demo you'll ever see is totally tricked out to work nice and smooth...and every 'live' demo you ever see will never work properly... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted May 2, 2007 Share Posted May 2, 2007 it's funny...he said that he has some sort of mega-super-computer with like, a bazillion GB of ram etc etc...it's so fast that when he was making the demos he'd have to stop and load them on his laptop just to make sure they still worked on 'normal' hardware...lol... That being said, it still seem that their new cloth solver is much better than Houdini's, I mean faster and more predictable. Yes, I think it a little unfair to start comparing the first version of dynamics in houdini, to something that's been around for awhile, like maya's dynamics. It's not been around for a while, this is their first iteration of a completely new dynamics architecture, in which all the solvers can interact with each other (you can consider this their answer to DOPs). Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted May 2, 2007 Share Posted May 2, 2007 We've just completed some work on Pirates 3 in which we used some the new Maya cloth dynamics (for the first time). The solver gave us really promising fast and complex results for the first few weeks. And then we ran into problems; which most involved awkward bugs like: the solver likes to work around the world origin - offsetting it and the surface starts to crinkle like mad. There were problems with constraints and wrap deformers that made the cloth people have to hop between Maya 8.5 and Maya 7.x. The short story is that the solver is really fast and good but has a couple of nasty awkward bugs that Autodesk couldn't fix in time. It's hard not to be jealous of that solver Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted May 2, 2007 Share Posted May 2, 2007 The short story is that the solver is really fast and good but has a couple of nasty awkward bugs that Autodesk couldn't fix in time.It's hard not to be jealous of that solver Considering it's v1 software, seems reasonable. I really hope SESI is up to something and the cloth solver won't remain as "website feature-list" usefulness. Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Serg Posted May 6, 2007 Share Posted May 6, 2007 (edited) Considering it's v1 software, seems reasonable.I really hope SESI is up to something and the cloth solver won't remain as "website feature-list" usefulness. Dragos Dunno about reasonable for a v1 software... a friend of mine was testing the new cloth solver in 8.5 (a simple unfolding flag) and run into some serious memory problems, i.e. as soon as simulation starts memory usage would go up n up till it reached the Gb's then maya crashes. He found the cause of the problem by accident... just put down down a default rez grid geometry and run the simulation with default settings and it all works fine... now put down the same rez grid object but make it 10 or 100 times bigger (cant remember the exact size) and boom! see u later maya... How can something like this pass through alpha testing, never mind beta and final release, is way beyond reasonable imho. Besides this, there are a LOT of simple stupid bugs in maya that have been there for years make wonder whether they have a beta testing process at all... its as if every "final release" is a public beta release. Serg Edited May 6, 2007 by Serg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted May 6, 2007 Share Posted May 6, 2007 I never used Maya nCloth, and I played only a little with DOPs cloth solver. But I asked here and there, and read some topics on this very forum. There are two things I noticed: nCloth seems quite good as a cloth solver (fast, predictable, manageable) and DOPs are unusable for Cloth. If someone needs cloth in their current project, there are 99% chances they won't be able to use Houdini for that. I don't care that much for the quality of nCloth. Seems normal and reasonable that they put a good cloth solver in a high-end software. The problem I have is SESI putting an unusable technology in their high-end software. Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kodiak Posted May 6, 2007 Share Posted May 6, 2007 Dunno about reasonable for a v1 software... a friend of mine was testing the new cloth solver in 8.5 (a simple unfolding flag) and run into some serious memory problems, i.e. as soon as simulation starts memory usage would go up n up till it reached the Gb's then maya crashes. Serg Sergio: yep..but that being said, the nucleus cloth solver is quite usable. Once you know a couple of the quirks, and the workflow isn't that bad either (in Maya terms, it's quite good actually . Still, I ended up rebuilding the shot on the parachute as well 3-4 times, that was due to another bug..once these 2 were figured, it was working ok. On the other hand, I wouldn't even attempt that shot with the Houdini cloth solver, to be honest. 40-50k polys of complex structure full of constraints..etc. It just wouldn't solve on time. Also, I'm not sure how stable solution it would result in in that case as I never had a week to play with complex cloth in H, just trying to guess based on simpler test cases. I would like to be proven wrong though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.