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rkarl
Sep '06

Hello,

I consider using Houdini. However, because it will take a lot of investment, I am doing extesive search in advance.

Will I need to learn shade programming for making volumetric and other special effects in Houdini, or does it come with a very rich set of predefined shaders either in Mental Ray or RenderMan, so I will have to do only some shader adjusting and tweaking?

Thank you,
Rene.

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    Sep '06

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    Dec '06
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18 days later
allegro
Oct '06

Not very many people here use Houdini, I would recommend looking at 1http://www.odforce.net1 for answers.

Shaders do take a little bit of work, but you can build them procedurally... so... the best way I can describe it is it's like compositing. You may need expressions, but nothing too fancy. Though VEX I guess is the language they use for their shaders.

I would definately download the apprentice version of Houdini and check it out if I were you. I can tell you it's easy, but it may not be easy to you.

Houdini is very very powerful, in my opinion.

1 month later
mikael
Dec '06

yes it is powefull.but, what good it is that you are the best partical guy in the globe,unless you don't know how to shade it. and it is not such a simple task.it is not imposibbly hard but not easy.there is a thin line between good looking thing and a piece of crab. you can think like this, you have a pretty good head model(or whatever), you want to sss it, you have to write it. this is not a one man task. houdini is not a one man software. it is powerfull if you use it as a team. in other softwares you have the chance of doing a little bit of this and alittle bit of that. but in houdini i have doubts. if you want to get deeper only in one area (maybe two) houdini is THE application,otherwise thing twice.

rkarl
Dec '06

Thank you both Brassi and Allegro,

I think I will stay with XSI then to see what XSI6 brings and how powerfull will be its C# support. I am a C++ programmer, and maybe, it will be OK, to customize XSI for me, to add particle functions and effects to it. Maybe it will be even easier than Houdini shader development.

I will see, and decide later.
Thank you very much for clever lines. They helped me.

Have a nice day,
Rene.