[OP] My Houdini 19 Wish List

[Music] hello my name is case and welcome to another right brain tutorials video see what i did there because this is not really a tutorial this is an opinion piece that's right so first of all thank you for your patience it's been a long time since i posted and the reason why is because i've been working on this massive massive project for a big client that was microsoft and i wasn't allowed to talk about it and i really didn't have time to do much of anything else but if you happen to catch the live streaming event with all of their new surface laptops and all the cool new stuff that microsoft introduced then you also got to catch a little bit of my work in there so at any rate i am back i want to get back into doing tutorials but i thought i would ease myself a little bit into it i thought it would be kind of fun to go through a bunch of my personal wish list now this is just my personal wishlist okay and it differs from a lot of other users and everybody's entire their opinion but i thought i would share some of the things that have been a little bit bugging me about houdini that i hope get addressed into the houdini 19 release so without further ado let's take a look alright so here we are this is houdini 18.5 still i'm not in 19 of course but um as i mentioned these are just my own personal wishes for an upcoming update of houdini maybe 19 maybe 19.5 maybe 20 or maybe even never uh i'm just gonna present these in no particular order just because of the fact that i just kind of went through and whatever popped into my head that i thought might be a nice improvement to have i jotted it down and i'm just going to share with you guys and hopefully you find this interesting and please let me know in the comments below what you think would be a cool update or improvement in houdini in an upcoming version okay so one of the first things that i love to see is more solvers at the top level let me explain a little bit so the base level of houdini is known as the obj level object level okay and if we have a geo node and we just dive into it now we are into the sub level the surface operator level side effects started to bring some solvers at the sub level so before solvers are their own sub network they have to kind of like dive into and you know adjust all your parameters in there in the sub network but now you can use some of the solvers at the soft level let me show you for instance let's type pyro and we have here a bunch of like pre-configured kind of things let's start with like maybe like the bonfire just gonna pull up the bonfire and automatically it creates a bunch of notes for us and if i hit play we'll see that we have a bit of a bonfire going uh into our viewport so this is all happening at the top level in the sense that we don't have any dops sub networks uh and this is what i'm talking about right here this pyrosolver which is actually available to us right here at the sub level and if we double click on it there's nothing in it right because all of the parameters are actually available um right here on this page on this parameter page and uh the cool thing about this is we can double click and we can actually instance for instance like some gas turbulence or some other types of disturbances and wire them right into the output and then they will affect the solver up here and that's only if you need to because sometimes you don't really need to and sometimes you're just happy with just these controls that are available to you so side effects did this with the pyro has done this with vellum solver of course which i think was the first one to actually kind of be a solver here at the stop level and i just uh wish that uh side effects continues down this trend things like for instance like the particles the pop solver is still something that you have to kind of configure a sub network that you have to dive into and you know like uh adjust things in there and i think a pop solver here at the top level would be a lot of fun and you know maybe we have like uh you know some fluid solve solvers that would be kind of nice to have here at the top level now some people might think well yeah but these are really simplified versions and it's still better to actually kind of have your dobs network properly and i would agree with you however in many cases you don't really need to go into that level of detail sometimes you just need to do something really simple and this is gonna do the trick just fine okay so i don't know how many you guys maybe downloaded this demo file from side effects this is like the market scene from the usd or uh unified scene description universal scene description i think that's what it is uh i think this uh came from 17.5 so it's been around for a while and you probably saw like the presentation that side effects did on usd and solaris and you thought to yourself oh my god this is going to be so awesome this is the future blah blah blah i can't wait to jump into it and then all of a sudden you jump into it and you start kind of seeing like some really really unusual sort of nodes and then there's this stuff with these things that mean something and [Music] stuff and it's exciting but it's also incredibly incredibly confusing at least for me to get into and apparently i'm not the only person who feels that way there's a lot of people that feel that usd in houdini has a lot of promise but it's a little bit kind of difficult like kind of really need to wrap your head around it so my wish for houdini 19 is that they continue to improve the workflow and try to make some of this stuff a little bit more intuitive a little bit more artistic a little bit more right-brained way of approaching this context right here so i hope that side effects continues to improve the usd in houdini and the way it's implemented and hopefully you know those guys are really smart and hopefully they can figure out a way that's a lot more intuitive and a lot simpler for the rest of us okay so related to usd and solaris we have karma okay so karma is a brand new rendering engine and it's really really cool and it's really fast and once again it has a lot of promise and i just hope that side effects continues to work on implementing karma and my number one wish for karma is that we can use it outside of the ust context outside of the solaris stage i don't know if this is possible i don't know if this is something that's hard coded and it's too difficult to you know to bring out into the regular you know render operators of houdini that we know and love and i just wish that i had access to karma outside of the you know usd stage context all right so let's talk about simplification of more context and the next one that i kind of hope for side effects to continue to make more user-friendly more right-brained so to speak is tops so tops is pdg this is like a way that you can basically multitask multi-process different things and it's really cool especially if you want to have like a lot of variations of things and i looked at it and i just like yeah like this is so way above my pay grade and once again i see a lot of potential with this and i know that studios and a lot of the you know boutique uh visual facts houses are doing some really amazing things using pdg and using tops i just hope that there's maybe an even you know further way of simplifying it for guys like me and i would love to be able to use it more and as i said i kind of start getting into tops and i become very very kind of confused by it and apparently i'm not the only one that feels this way because i've been reading a lot of other people kind of expressed the same type of frustration with tops and pdg so side effects if you're listening please make it a little bit easier for us all right so moving right along my next wish is for houdini to show some love to chops chops stands for channel operators okay and if you've seen some of my other tutorials i love channel operators for instance we have a simple sphere here and let's say that i just want to animate it so it kind of bobs up and down kind of like frantically i can just right click here i can go under motion effects i can add some noise okay and now if i hit play our sphere is going to go crazy because it's got all this kind of noise affecting its y position so this is really cool it's a great way of adding animation without necessarily creating keyframes and it can be very very powerful it's just that i think that shops has been a little bit neglected in recent versions of houdini i think it needs to be brought up to speed it may be some additional optimization so it kind of runs that much faster and smoother anyway this is really cool and i hope that side effects gives shops a little bit of love in houdini 19 or if not 19 19.5 continuing on the thread of animation let's say that we don't want to use chops but we just want to use traditional keyframe animation so let's say i have my sphere here i'm going to put like a keyframe right here i'm just going to option click and i'm going to go a little bit further and say i don't know go like 10 meters to the left okay and i hit play and now my sphere moves and if i want to fine-tune this animation i can just shift-click on here and i have this nice little graph ease like so and now i can kind of make some adjustments to the curve and so on and so forth i mean this is pretty straightforward from other vcc packages and yet i always kind of feel like it kind of fights me in some way shape or form i feel that it's not as intuitive to use i think that there's some room for improvement i mean this obviously works there's a lot of people doing some amazing animation in houdini but once again i think that the whole timeline keyframe animation and ability to implement and fine-tune keyframe animation a little bit more intuitively and easily is you know a welcome improvement in houdini so i hope this is coming for houdini 19 some love to the key framing and timeline controls all right so my next wish for houdini 19 is that side effects continues a bit of a trend that i'm seeing where they're adding more functionality on a per node basis let me explain this a little bit better for instance the group node in my opinion has evolved quite nicely here let me just kind of pull up a group node and you'll see a little bit what i mean so the group node used to be pretty straightforward you just kind of select some polygons and tell it to group it and off you go but what side effects has been adding a little bit by little bit is some cool ways of grouping things without necessarily having to select individual polygons you know keeping bounding regions for instance or keep by normals or uh include by edges and you know and you can kind of fine-tune all this stuff and i think this is an example of side effects starting to add more functionality on a single node so that before you might have been able to do all of those things except maybe you needed like multiple nodes and now in certain cases just a single group node will allow you to group and select specifically the polygons or points or what have you that you need another example for instance is here's the copy to points right and uh i mean yeah this is great i mean this does exactly what it advertises i just kind of copied a bunch of boxes onto this um uh kind of asteroid asteroidal uh sphere that i made uh but once again it would be kind of nice why not have a way of randomizing the size and position i don't know like you know rotation why not i mean you can do all those with wrangle nodes you can you know use mobs but but you know maybe copy points could have a little randomization feature as well i mean you know to me simpler is better right um even you know something like uh copy and transform you know why not add like some randomization you know factors for rotation scale position what have you you know like to me those are all things that come in really really handy and yes you can do it you can do it but you know all of a sudden you start building your knob complexity and maybe side effects could choose to add some of these frequently used things into those single nodes to just kind of make everything a little bit cleaner and simpler now as some of you guys might know back in november of 2020 epic games actually invested a great deal of money into side effects and this has been a really really great development because there's a lot of cohesion between the two companies and some of you guys that are into game development probably know just how well integrated houdini has become into unreal engine and this is all really really amazing kind of stuff that's happening behind the scenes so my wish is maybe for some of that technology from unreal engine to come back towards houdini because it would be really really cool some of you guys know there's been some new developments with unreal engine with nanite which allows for millions and millions of polygons to be on screen and displayed in real time and lumen which is effectively a real-time global illumination technology and some of you guys might also know that i am of course a big fan of blender and eevee and i think this is such a great tool to be able to kind of have some real-time feedback of what's going on in the scene i mean you can see here are like glowing lights there's volume metrics i mean kind of see what you're doing before you have to hit that render button and i would love to see some of this real engine technology actually come to the houdini viewport i am under no illusions that this is happening for houdini 19 maybe even like a bit of a wishful thinking for houdini 20 who knows but i certainly hope that behind the scenes the conversation has started between epic games and side effects to bring some of that unreal technology to the houdini viewport all right this video is starting to get a little too long so i'm going to go through the following list really quick those are some smaller things that i hope that side effects is bringing to us in houdini 19 so i'll start from give us access to quicktime files mp4 video files that are not image sequences i understand that houdini comes from a you know a long line of very very high-end studio professional kind of workflows and image sequences tend to be favorite for those types of operations however i would love to just be able to kind of use you know quicktime you know movie files or mp4 or h.264 or like animated textures or anything like that i think be awesome i would also love to see a progress bar somewhere i mean i know that like when i'm doing like some heavy computations that i will get like on the bottom of my screen it will start kind of saying what it's doing but it's not giving me any idea of roughly how long that's going to take and i understand it sometimes it's very difficult for houdini itself to know but i would just love some sort of progress bar because sometimes i'm not even sure if houdini just crashed then it's just kind of frozen and i need to restart it or if it's actually still computing stuff so i would love for side effects to implement some sort of progress bar when houdini's doing some heavy duty calculations just to give me an idea that something is going on here's a bit of a unusual thing but i'm going to mention i'm going to go way back when to where i was a cinema 4d user and one of the things i really liked about cinema 4d here i'm just going to show you is that you can have a little preview of you know just by uh clicking on the cinema 4d file it can actually tell you what is inside this file okay and this comes in really really handy when you're not really quite sure you know what file you're looking for you can just kind of click on a file in the finder and you can kind of see a little preview of what kind of geometry is in there and i found this to be so useful and i would love if the hip files from houdini also had this kind of preview built in my understanding is that blender is actually going to have previews into the file you know on the finder built in and i think this is a great great way of keeping your work organized and you know finding things that you might be you know maybe worked on you know years ago and you're not really quite sure what you named them and so on and so forth anyway i think this would be really really cool okay so this one is very specific to mac users but please please please please please make houdini compatible with arm cpus with the new m1 or m1x or m2 or whatever apple is going to be releasing these are really exciting cpus they are powerful they are fast and i would love to see a native version of houdini that supports arms cpu i think this is technology that's coming regardless of your platform i mean right now you know apple's heavily invested into it but i am sure that you know uh microsoft is looking into it intel amd all those other companies are exploring arm cpus and i think that they're going to be a thing of the future so the sooner the better and if side effects can give some mac users a little bit of love and support for those m1 and as i said m1x m2 whatever is coming from apple i think that would be fantastic now i am a big fan of axiom i don't know if you guys have used it uh matt kukala prachala sorry if i'm mispronouncing your name matt uh but axiom is a really really cool add-on for houdini that allows you to basically compute you know pyro simulations using your gpu this is really fantastic technology and matt is an incredibly smart guy and i just think that side effects needs to build this technology right into houdini i mean this is after all what a software developer does finds way to optimize the code and finds way of taking advantage of all the technology that's available to the users to make everything faster and what matt has done is really really impressive but it really should be part of houdini proper so i really hope that houdini 19 is going to have opencl optimization or you know some other way of taking advantage of gpus it already does but not quite as well as axiom does and i think that they need to talk to matt and they need to figure out what matt has figured out and implemented right into houdini 19 i think that would be a really cool thing to have all right i hope you enjoyed watching this video as i said i know nothing about what's actually coming we should be finding out in a matter of a couple weeks at most when they usually have some sort of preview video or teaser coming up so at that point we'll know just how wrong i was and i'm sure that i completely missed the boat on most of these things thank you for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Right-Brained Tutorials

Views: 830

Rating: 4.9166665 out of 5

Keywords: adobe, aftereffects, houdini, vfx, video, post, production, after, effects, CGI, tutorials, premiere, null, objects, camera, 3d, C4D, maxon, studio, redshift, render, exr, cinema4d, maya, translation, psr, c4d, Maxon, alien, scene, sunset, planet, distant, sun, moon, 3delight, UDIM, Substance Painter, Substance3d

Id: i7cxZHTuEy8

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021