Five things I miss in new Houdini 20

[@Bolaway]

The problem of Houdini is that We can't find much information of their workflow. The seniors on Discord just want to correct the English instead of answer questions about the software.

[@diyz3n]

yeah, I know . The community is not big enough as a blender community for example, but having said that we can find our way out.

[@MichaelHalsell]

Thank you for sharing your observations. Which H.20 feature(s) will be popular or timesaver for real world use?

[@diyz3n]

Yeah thanks, I appreciate it yeah, I think they put a lot of work into karma, especially XPU, I guess we will see a lot of people use karma(because it’s optimized for the Houdini toolset) The next thing they worked on well was kinfx animation tools and I guess this one will be a new era for Houdini, I think the Legion of animator in Maya has not decided yet to use this one but they will The rest of the future are small one and improvements basically

[@Somethinginvisible1]

hello sir, out of topic in this video. but I have a question. could you explain any usd workflow houdini to c4d?? always been enjoying ur greatful video! sorry for terrible english XD

[@diyz3n]

hi man, first thank you for the compliment Second, Do you have any specific case for that for example, exporting crowd using USD or exporting simulation? And of course, your English was great

[@Somethinginvisible1]

@@diyz3n especially any high res particle sim(maybe above 10M particles) and packed object (basically highres polygon) : ) I learned about any alembic workflow but. I watched ur USD transfering crowd sim. but I want to know specipically! Thank you for the mention! 🤩

[@diyz3n]

you see I’m not a technical guy, but I will make that simple to you: USD has more advantage than alembic because it will store more data (like Materials, point attributes, light 💡, etc ) in Houdini especially, I found exporting a USD sequence is more efficient than exporting a single USD file as a whole simulation (which you can find in the USD ROP setting and make sure to flash the data, after every frame, you export otherwise you will your fill your ram and crash)

[@diyz3n]

of course I’m not using USD more often because cinema 4d it’s not support all the future comes from Houdini USD but it’s trying to get there of course

[@janvollgod7221]

Comparing to other software packages, sidefx put really a lot of new and useful feature in their releases. I personally hoped for more real-time features too, but since unreal 5.x, a lot of stuff can be directly done in Unreal, so it's not really a problem. What i still not understand, is the total ignorance of GPU Utilization by sideFX in their particle/flip solver. At least the XPU can be used with a lot of features. But this is in my opinion to little and to late, when you see free packages like Blender and Unreal, doing brutal stuff, nearly in real-time. This may not bother big studios with huge projects, but hey, not everyone is working on 16k footage. At least i am not. For rel. 21 or 22, this could become a more and more bigger problem for Houdini. Just look where Unreal is heading and now Blender Powerhouse with 4.0.

[@diyz3n]

yeah, I really totally agree with you. I was wondering why side fx not going in real time solution but in past releases, I found out something about side fx. They are so caution about next move and as he(CEO) said he’ll take that carefully and that unfortunately means slow for us.

[@Alex_And848]

Yeah, SideFX are going very careful with GPGPU stuff. FLIP Solver can utilize GPU using OpenCL. In some cases it might accelerate the computation and in some cases it can make it worse (if GPU runs out of memory - it will eventually move all computational tasks to CPU, and it can throttle solving) Especially for large-scale, high-res simulations. But I understand what are you talking about... Realtime... I can try to guess on why aren't they pushing towards GPU computation... It's tricky. It's hard or sometimes impossible to parallelize some algorithms. So something can run on a CPU only. GPU computations are much more unstable than if just using your RAM and CPU. It's hard to explain here, but it's clear that due to the way GPU works, working with it can be very very tricky and complicated. So I think it all comes down to optimization. SideFX are putting a lot of effort to debug and optimize everything to keep everything as stable as possible. I suppose, in the near future, if they will try to make a first step to GPU-based particle fluid solver, it will be for prototyping. Like real time preview before final simulation on a CPU (Like they did 'Minimal OpenCL Solver' for Pyro Solver, to play with it and receive an instant results) But we do not lose hope. In the future releases I hope there will be something...

[@santiagorinaldi1712]

100% agreed with u!

[@diyz3n]

Yeah, dude 👌 I guess you miss that too

[@jamaljamalwaziat1002]

the most one i could say i hope for is ragdoll recovery

[@diyz3n]

Yeah, that’s my favorite 😑

[@carlosrivadulla8903]

Things I miss on this release: COPs revamp, sculpting, scales tools, karma baker, AI accelerated karma, gpu multithreading pyro, AI powered SOPs, Geometry CHOPs into SOPs, real time, tree tools 2, more gaea like terrain SOPs , better xform gizmos, UI enhancements, dopesheet rework, direct modeling improvements, symmetry, more snapping presets, NURBS modeling, Neural VDBs, layout node improvements, what's new on vellum.

[@diyz3n]

Dude, I guess you have the full list here 😄

[@diyz3n]

My top 5 on your list is: 1-AI powered sops 2-GPU multithreading Pyro 3-karma Baker 4-real time 5-improvement UI

[@luigir.179]

Hello I'm new to Houdini. Obviously I find it wonderful. But in terms of polygonal modelling I find it less immediate than Blender. I repeat the whole procedural part is great, but I find it more cumbersome. It's my impression, for the fact that I'm a beginner, I Blender is more powerful as geometry modelling tools? Thank you

[@diyz3n]

@@luigir.179 in my opinion modeling in Houdini is too difficult for me. I do that in the cinema 4D, but in terms of Blender, unfortunately, I can answer that because I’m not a blender user I guess other guys can give us their opinion

[@Alex_And848]

NeuralVDB's are most likely won't show up. Because it was developed by NVIDIA and I don't think it works on AMD machines. SideFX won't do things that aren't going to work on everyone's machines. And I can say that in some cases you can reduce VDB files size by caching it in 16-bit float precision. It will save half of memory. Example: { cloud.vdb [1Gb, 32-bit] -> -> prune it *[Primitive SOP]* (Check "Write 16-Bit Floats" option) -> -> Cache it *[File Cache SOP]* -> -> cloud_fp16.vdb [512Mb, 16-bit] } Congrats, you have saved half of memory that could have been used And I wanna say that SideFX are doing a lot of things for us already, they're working really hard... I think Rewriting COPs will take a lot of effort. And I saw that SideFX are looking for Compositing Software Developer (future opportunity) But... This job opening has been hanging out here for a while already... If my memory serves me right... (You can check this @ SideFX.com/careers/) Sculpting... I don't know. Is there any reason? Scales tools might be in future releases. They just finished with feather-toolset which is damn great... AI-accelerated Karma? GPU-based Pyro Solver would be nice, it might be in the future I guess. AI-powered SOPs, hmmh... SideFX said that they aren't going to pin everything on AI, and they'll keep pushing towards and staying by proceduralizm. (It's not a good idea to put everything on AI tho, but it doesn't mean that they will refuse AI) In H20 there will be some tools for machine-learning stuff. And we also have MLOPs 3rd-party plugin. CHOPs to SOPs? You mean driving geometry by CHOPs or smthng? Realtime, yes, they will do their best to improve the performance and the quality. Vulkan API for a viewport says a lot already. (But experimental for now) Tree tools, maybe. Or maybe SideFX labs will figure out something It would be nice for Terrain SOPs to receive some improvements, yeah. At least in H20 they added frustum-shaped heightfields which makes me a bit more happy! But there's still lack of some functionality. I would prefer the adaptive meshing for terrain or something like that, because it's kinda painful to convert high-detailed large heightfields to high mesh density, and then reduce it manually. Better xform gizmos, maybe. I kinda like them, but there's might be room for improvements, yeah. UI improvements, idk, I'm kinda comfy with everything as it is. Dopesheet, idk. Direct (polygonal if I understood that right) modeling, idk, maybe they will one day, but we still have blender for that. And I think there's a 3rd-party paid plugin for polygonal modeling for Houdini. Snapping presets, maybe NURBS modeling would be kinda cool, I would like to see their approach to this Phew... That's a lot of text...

[@annasnezhnaia8311]

Haha, good notes.

[@diyz3n]

Tnx dear 🌹

[@dalelinney8437]

I disagree with almost everything you said (the exception being the ragdoll bit)

[@diyz3n]

yeah, dude, it’s natural to disagree with me. We are just human beings talking about the subject, that’s just my point of view and yeah, the ragdoll.. 🌹

[@cinepark1428]

SideFX strongly argues that Diyz3n's words should be heeded.

[@diyz3n]

You know I believe in sidefx company and I big fan of CEO because he have big vision but it is matter of time and I believe we will get there with the mighty Houdini

[@BrentonWoods774]

They shoud finally redesign the UI into something more modern.

[@diyz3n]

totally agree they can maintain the procedure design, but we need a new UI as you said

[@Mati_Motion]

Houdini need to work, not to have nice buttons. Ui is very easy to work with.... when I saw nodes in UE i wanted to vomit :D

[@diyz3n]

Man I have the same feeling for UE Nodes 😄, I thought that just me

[@Mati_Motion]

@@diyz3n UE look like Windows Vista 😂😂😂🫣🫣 but in case of houdini I Wonder what people want to change in ui

[@diyz3n]

I guess he meant simplified modern,sexy ,more colorized look