Try Houdini for free

[johnl3d]

https://www.sidefx.com/

[nemyax]

So you've found the Tinkerer's Paradise, haven't you? =)

[John Bigboote]

Great demo reel! SO- if you try and you wanna buy... $4,000?

[nemyax]

$200 per year for the Indie variety.

[Rodney]

Free for the apprentice (non commecial) variety

 

Houdini Apprentice is a free version of Houdini FX which can be used by students, artists and hobbyists to create personal non-commercial projects. It has a limited render size, a watermark on renderings and other minor limitations... Apprentice lets you save to disk and render out with a word mark.

 

[pixelplucker]

Better off with the sub for $200 a year. I looked at it but not impressed with the interface. Awesome capability but think I'm an old dog now and too tired to dive into that so I'll stick with AM.

 

Nice to see SideFX start to hunt down the competion like, Max, Maya, Lightwave etc.

 

For tinkering, try a demo of EIAS3D. Always like their interface, very easy to follow.

[nemyax]

What makes Houdini Apprentice great is that it doesn't get in your way if you want to save your work. Just plop a File SOP to write your model to a popular format, or write a script to convert your animation to a custom format. Apprentice won't mind.

[Rodney]

The benefit to using Houdini for most of us would be much like that of any other application or utility... how to use it best with A:M.

As Houdini is well known for its ability to create special effects creating the effects in such a way as to composite them within a scene in A:M would be ideal.

As Houdini's focus is procedural it might be able to handle heavy shots that wouldn't be ideal to tackle in A:M.

 

Added: Another use for some applications is previsualization of a shot or sequence.

It may be easier to set up an initial shot in some other application to organize an idea.

Then (perhaps optimally) figure out how best to recreate the whole thing in A:M.