cgR – Episode #005 – “Meet Eugene”
“…… custom..uh.. “customizability”, if thats a word…”
Hey oh. Well here we are again. This episode is a little bit different from the norm (with the exception of Episode 2). It is the introduction of a new member to the cgRoundup team. His name… is Eugene. When i first thought of cgR i thought of a show with 3 people. 3 opinion, 3 voices, 3 specialties.
The reason why this episode isn’t the norm, will become apparent after the first 3 minutes of the show so why not I give you a rundown of what we talked about. Simply put it was all about Houdini. We speculate we debate and dream of features that will make it into the next version of SideFX cornerstone app. I would like to add for those hardcore users that this will not be our only discussion about Houdini.
Because of the nature of the test there are many many things we skip over and neglect, so i apologize to those guys and gals who might feel a little short changed especially since this particular portion of audio goodness wasn’t intended for mass consumption. But I thought what the hell, since Eugene has a lot to say and he is pretty easy to listen to (unlike my foghorn sounding voice 
), I figured someone out there might want to tune in to hear we talked about.
This episode isn’t that hard to follow but I felt it might go a “tiny” bit over people’s head since not an overwhelming amount of people use Houdini and for those outside that very special circle it might be a little bit intimidating. Which is why…
This episode has been rated: 
and no… customizability is not a word, i don’t care what urban dictionary says. (thank you Eugene for making use of the correct term “customization” 
)
on August 17th, 2009 at 3:46 am
[...] so after I was invited to be part of the team I jumped at the chance. My debut is currently up as Episode 5 which was originally going to be just an audio test with Andrew but we talked for a crazy long [...]
on August 18th, 2009 at 2:59 am
keep up the good work. love it. chat or show or whatever.
could you clarify if you and Eugene will be forming your own Houdini “middleware” company in the US or UK? and the email address of where to send my resume.
hopefully more pertinent comments later. peace & 42
on August 18th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
ok, another generalistic reply to this awesome show. did you catch i’m a Houdini fan?
my main feeling is that things run their course. it seems that there might be a surge to quality at the beginning of somethings, but as time wears on it will appear that more and more ppl are less and less concerned with quality and are more interested in saying, “look what i did.” perhaps therein lies the paradox, the more ppl that jump onboard the less likely they come from the same “place.”
in the process of trying to grow their user base, H has had to deal with an uphill battle of ppl that are experienced in 3D but not in “procedural” anything. add insult to injury that the competition is adding “proceduralism” to their apps. so basically, it’s GAME ON! as we get to see who wins more market share moving into the competition’s territory.
i’m sure everybody and their mother can say all that in one sentence, but well, i’m not everybody. ;o)
a few other “quick” comments: H had a Modeling SOP at one point. from what i’ve read about it, it was like having a modeling app in one node. there were issues with it and i’m sure it couldn’t be updated as fast as *everybody* that used it wanted, but at the same time it was *not* procedural and broke the whole H method so it was tossed.
and lastly, as deeply open as H is, i’m surprised there aren’t more plugins for it. at this point they’d be custom shelf tools for sale, but why not? it seems that some requests could be done w/ a bit of scripting, packaged nicely and sold. anybody have any insight into this?
thanks.
on November 14th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Thanks for a show! Just a few thoughts (warning! laud thinking)
COPs development:
The rumor is that cops have a serious problem with Houdini’s architecture which plays against it. Single threaded GUI, *tile based cops processing, and caching thing. It seems SESI realized they can’t push cops development much further without huge rearrangements in Houdini’s basement itself. At least this is how I read it. Halo makes trouble mainly because of memory issues, which is main thing to focus on in case of image processing, but can’t be repaired in current stage of Houdini.
Other then that it’s really a matter of putting a couple of tools more to make it robust. But without speed and stability this investments would be pointless.
Market & expectations:
How I see it and actually experience it every day, it’s a case of compromising two markets. As we know SESI is slowly approaching new land. Grown up in core movie industry it tries to get into smaller houses. Their expectations much differ from big studios. Looks like SESI does their best to join these end, but it’s rather easy to see how particular choices in Houdini’s development reflects more one side or another. They have to share resources between those worlds, instead of focusing on a single market (like in case of Modo or Cinema4D, whose are not expected to build strong rendering backend or tight OS integration for example).
Note how new Houdini’s cloth solver was build in cooperation with DD on demand of demolition work. I’m glad we have it, but at the same time I understand why we can’t use it for character work (practically). Well, it seems SESI thinks precisely that: “honesty, we are not an animation tool, no one uses our software for that, what’s the point to invest into character toolset, we tried and we failed”. At the same time, small house buying 10K$ software expects complete toolset. This is afaik an example of conflict taking place here.
The same goes for **Mantra development. Whole flexibility of Houdini/Mantra pipe doesn’t matter for 5 sits house. For them Mantra as an alternative for mental ray needs uber shaders, not ifd filtering (which I love and use often). BTW Uber Shader people usually mention is not a thing you talk about guys, as far as I understand that need. It’s much more then compilation of all lighting/ texturing effects. It’s about caching, accelerated reflections, custom illuminance loop tricks (exports, magic lights, overwrites), environmental lighting, layered materials, micro-scale effects, physical light effects, energy conservation and so on… things most people can’t make for them self in vops.
cheers!
* – looks like tiling is really worse choice in this case. At least judging from competitors. Both Nuke and Shake have scanline engines and are rock solid and fast, unlike Fusion (tiled engine like cops) which suffered for a long time performance/memory problems (haven’t tried it for a long time now).
** – personally I miss micro-polygon stuff which doesn’t evolve much now giving place for volumetics (studios!) and PBR (boutiques!). Few years back Mantra was head to head with 3delight, but not anymore. Of course no one pays for rendering whole features and animations with Mantra, thus it’s nonsense to compete with 3delight and that ground.
on March 24th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
You would not believe how long ive been searching for something like this. Through 8 pages of Google results and couldnt find anything. Very first page on Bing. There was this…. Really have to start using it more often!