www.si-community.com

As Ï am seriously considering migrating to Houdini Indie in the near future, I was wondering, if there are any good affordable online introductory training courses to get me started...

There's nothing more affordable than free.

SideFX have their own quickstart tutorials for beginners:

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/?level=1

Also

As a beginner make sure you do not do any tutorials over 2 years old. Tutorials for versions lower than 15.0 can be confusing.

Yes, older versions of Houdini tend to do stuff a bit differently in a lot of cases.
Don't worry about the basics of the app, as they are the same in every version so older videos still apply.

But Peter Quint's videos on YT or Vimeo are very good to get a feel of Houdini.

If you want some other free stuff, there's the free video's of Rohan Dalvi. He also offers good commercial training.

And very inspiring stuff is at Entagma.

Preapred to get lost in CHOPS, VOPS, DOPS, POPS and more OPS ;)

rob

Thank you both... ;)

Rork wrote:Preapred to get lost in CHOPS, VOPS, DOPS, POPS and more OPS ;)

Yeah..... Houdini can be a bit overwhelming after the first UI steps ;)

I'm very much looking forward to Houdini 16, after all the teaser videos.
I really hope they cleaned up some of the more convoluted workflows and made it (again) a bit more user friendly for the 'regular' artist.

And of course there's a wealth of information on the SideFX forums, and most of the SI users can be found there too ;)

Enjoy!

rob

Rork wrote:I'm very much looking forward to Houdini 16, after all the teaser videos.
I really hope they cleaned up some of the more convoluted workflows and made it (again) a bit more user friendly for the 'regular' artist.

This is exactly what H16 is all about. They have made the UI more user friendly. It's hopefully going to be released imminently so it may be worth holding out for it.

@Hirazi,

Forgot about this little set of introduction videos for Houdini:eosacro - Houdini Basics Series

rob

I am considering moving to Houdini Indie as well.

I found myself less and less using Soft / Maya and more traditional (painting & photography) or coding & procedural lately. I did not renew my AD subscription also.

The AD experience left a bad taste and I am looking for a more positive atmosphere. SideFX look to be a more positive company, the other one is Pixologic. With the money saved from my subscription, I can afford both.

Time to move on greener pasture I guess. Because of my interest of procedural, I thing Houdini Indie will be a good fit.

I will look at H16 too, but people here are going C4D route and dropping 3ds Max - except those that are more connected to architecture work.

That's the spirit everyone

Just remember Houdini is not a direct replacement for Softimage. In many ways it is nothing like it and never will be. Just leave your Softimage baggage at the door and approach it like you are learning CG for the first time.

Are there any tutorials specifically geared towards understanding vops/vex from the perspective of Softimage ICE users?

Not that much, as far as I know. There are some examples at Side Effects site, let's say VOP or SOP loop examples for H 15, really important for H. That is, loop is your destiny in H, because support for array operations is nowhere close to ICE or Fabric.
By the way I've started something while ago - only first few pages are usable, while rest of thread.... evolved into something else.

From their forums life, it seems that ''serious" H user is supposed to do everything by some sort of coding, don't know why, is it about limitations of basically shader editing system adapted to do something with points too. Or they just don't know for quick work. Probably that orientation explains why everything they are doing is looking so... stiff, imho.

Anyway, while system is a bit rigid (politely to say), usually asking for more nodes than ICE for same task, way more unforgivable than ICE, exactly that ''discipline'' makes somehow easier to build something from scratch. It definitively can do a lot with VOPs, also there is a number of nice not-well-known features, for example 0 or 1 integer exported with 'group' prefix creates the group ( group_my group or like). System allows to easy combine the classic modeling/deformation operators (that could be SOP) with VOP SOPs, which alone is advantage.

Hirazi Blue wrote:Are there any tutorials specifically geared towards understanding vops/vex from the perspective of Softimage ICE users?

I'm afraid not. I haven't come across any. It requires a lot of trial and error.

A good place to start learning VEX is here:

https://vimeo.com/67677051

It's a little old but this might help too:

https://vimeo.com/89869747

There are also a bit old but useful Softimage to Houdini Guides from Jordi Bares.
He also said on his thread on sidefx forum that he's working on the new guides (sidefx thread).

Hirazi Blue wrote:Are there any tutorials specifically geared towards understanding vops/vex from the perspective of Softimage ICE users?

Personaly I don't think it's very usefull. It's pretty straight forward when you know the equivalent nodes names like rescale=fitrange. Plus that's more geared to change existing values than creating geometry. In ice you create particles in the ice tree, On houdini you don't, eventually you will use a vop node to change the velocity or something but that's all.

Over the time i found understanding the software logic more complicated that simply understanding vops or chops. In houdini Vops are just custom tools/operators, just like what was ICE. But in softimage the operators are stacked verticaly and you don't bother so much what's happen there, in Houdini that's where everything happens, the operator stack is now an operator tree.

That's the most confusing thing coming from softimage... but that's also where's it's more powerfull/interesting.

I think you better have to check the rohan dalvie tutorials because they explain exactly how to deal with that.

Cheers