Houdini really is a different thing. Its procedural-only focus is all-encompassing, resource intensive, and difficult to combine with other paradigms. People that talk about Blender overtaking Houdini as a professional tool have no clue what they’re talking about. It’s not that it can’t, it shouldn’t because they’ve got totally different focuses that make for a pretty awkward fit. Blenders sims are making great strides but to shoot for feature parity would make blender a worse program. So much unnecessary complexity if you don’t need that niche toolkit.
I know more people that love Maya then love Max, which is funny because IMO Max is much better for modeling. Maya, however, really is great for spline-based animation, generally, but specifically character animation. Blender has been making big jumps there though. The reason I’m glad that I learned the big propriety clients in school— Houdini, Maya, Max, Zbrush, Nuke, Mari, etc.— is because it’s a much more marketable skill for big studios, and much more difficult to get that experience yourself. Our program’s tooling was entirely focused on getting students into the big studio career pipeline be it in vfx, animation, tech art, game design, etc. I guarantee that students would have come out of that program better artists, fundamentally, had they learned how to do all of that stuff in Blender. Given my career ambitions, I’m not sad I got what I got though.
Completely agree that Houdini is not currently in the same class as Blender, Maya, Max etc…. It is a different animal.
that being said, it is hard not to see how much their character animation tools are improving without seeing this as a direct threat on eastablished ‘trad’ 3d tools.
What fundamentally sets it apart is that (in my super limited experience) under the hood it closer to being a language than an app in the traditional sense. This makes it more future proof than its competitors. Lack of future proof is what has almost killed Modo, an app I adored. In the end, it proved far too slow and no amount of updates addressed this fact.
It’s not even like a language — it’s several languages spread across half a dozen purposes -built environments. I’m definitely interested to see where apex goes, but it’s going to need a lot of work in both the workflow and how they communicate its value before it gets any real adoption outside of some tech artists working on super complex skeletons and rigs. As of now, everything I’ve seen has been essentially a coding demo with visuals. Working with Advanced Skeleton in Maya is just so elegant and capable— between that and industry inertia, I have a hard time imagining it’s going to be the standard anytime soon. I think the real sleeper here is UE. You can model, make skeletons, rig, paint skin weights all right in there with a pretty smooth UI. I think they’re doing to lap everyone in like a decade.
I know more people that love Maya then love Max, which is funny because IMO Max is much better for modeling. Maya, however, really is great for spline-based animation, generally, but specifically character animation. Blender has been making big jumps there though. The reason I’m glad that I learned the big propriety clients in school— Houdini, Maya, Max, Zbrush, Nuke, Mari, etc.— is because it’s a much more marketable skill for big studios, and much more difficult to get that experience yourself. Our program’s tooling was entirely focused on getting students into the big studio career pipeline be it in vfx, animation, tech art, game design, etc. I guarantee that students would have come out of that program better artists, fundamentally, had they learned how to do all of that stuff in Blender. Given my career ambitions, I’m not sad I got what I got though.