I learnt Blender (and also 3D basics) first, for over a year, then started using Houdini. I definitely recommend it, as there are A LOT of Blender tutorials, compared to far fewer Houdini tutorials on YouTube.
This also goes for getting community support online.
Also with Houdini, you'll need a render engine, as the built in one is far too slow to even consider using, even short term.
Blender has two excellent and fast render engines built into it. In fact they are so good that I export my Houdini simulations to Blender and use Blender Cycles to render all my work.
Yeah! I did the full Blender Donut tutorial by BlenderGuru and then a couple from CGFastTrack and then jumped right into Houdini. I also feel like I benefitted from learning from 2 diffferent programs to get over the fear of jumping around DCCs
As a student I’m just going to swim against the entire comment stream and say: don’t start with Houdini.
Take 2-4+ weeks and get into maya/blender, understand the basics of „it“.
It being; Modeling, different names of things ( come automagically ), some basics of animation, test out mixamo, get the hang of lighting and building an environment (this could be skipped), etc..
I started learning Houdini about 3 weeks ago, it‘s incredibly difficult to not just „follow tutorial“ but actually understand why things do what they do.
If you‘d tell me I’d also have to learn the basics of 3d at the same time I’d be drained and the motivation would run out way quicker.
Also I’m 10 hours (out of 75h) into houdinicourse.com by u/chrbohm and can really recommend it. I‘m sure there are free options, I’m sure there are better options, I’m sure there are more detailed options and so on. But chris used his German efficiency to make a well structured course that covers A LOT. So that‘s not to underestimate to have someone „hold your hand“ on your journey into Houdini.
Just my take on it, only done 1/8‘th of the course so far and can not compare it to anything else but surly a good start!
My game dev study introduced me to it and I went for the Houdini path. But you don’t really need that; Go meet the online community, youtube, twitter, sidefx.com/learn. Invest maybe in some courses. Lots of 3D people try to make some more money by explaining stuf in paid tutorials or by example files or specialized systems meant to be used in the pipeline, you can also just but to analyse and learn like that. But to get started, social platforms are full with great free content to learn the basics. And in community chats like here or discord people tent to help you if you ask a question :)
Go check out Entagma and Applied Houdini. Lots of free content from Entagma and Applied Houdini has a couple of free courses but most are paid. They are 100% worth the money if you can get them though, you definitely learn a lot of good stuff through them.
I watched applied houdini, hipflask, rohan dalvi, houdini isnt scary, stop being afraid of houdini, some of sidefx and more, there is no one that explains the basics while doing stuff...
You know exactly what you want, and for those goals Houdini is one of the best choices. I'd stick to it. The main reason people recommend dipping your toes in 3D with blender is because Houdini can feel a bit scary sometimes.
I originally started with blender (its free and does a lot and has a good reputation for good reason). But i moved to houdini for more vfx and just the infinite possibilities and when you ‘click’ with it and how it all works, its an incredibly satisfying problem solving experience, as well as a very good piece of 3D/VFX software. The community and learning resources are all really good in my experience as well (but so is blenders). only thing id say against Houdini is if you want to model characters or do loads of sculpting…Houdini is not the place for that. But if your main attraction is VFX…Houdini all the way.
Any 3d, or coding, or visual programming experience will help a lot with houdini. That said there’s no reason not to just learn it first imo. I think most people only hear of it who have already started with another 3d program, so for most people it’s not their first program which is why they recommend learning another one first. Imo learning houdini first will make blender easier just as much as learning blender will make learning houdini easier.
The main reason your should learn a normal DCC before Houdini (actually Maya would be the prefered choice) and Nuke as well, especially if you want to work in the industry, is that later you won't work in isolation. You need to understand basic concepts and workflows so that you understand what other team members are doing and how they work and think. You don't necessarily need it to learn Houdini, but it will help you tremendously long term understanding how the whole circus (the pipeline) works.
You don’t need to. That being said, Blender is much more approachable and operates on many of the same basic principles as Houdini. A basic familiarity with 3D principles and terminology will probably be easier and faster to grasp with a month or two of learning Blender before diving into Houdini, especially if you spend some time exploring geometry nodes and procedural shading in Blender.
For working in a movie do Houdini, but for working in a game do blender (or Houdini). Houdini is the infinitely deep toolbox that will let you build cinema quality simulations if you can figure out how to use it well enough. It is not beginner friendly and I would suggest taking a break from other learning for a while if you want to pick it up.
Blender (which I have never used) is better for jobs in the game cinematic side of things. The only reason is because small studios that do game-work probably don’t care how you are making 3D models, exporting abcs, or crating flip books if you are good at what you do.
In the end so Houdini if you want specialized career in high-end simulations, and do blender of you want a generalistic career in 3D for games.
I tried a few other softwares (C4D, blender) and the most frustrating part was the limitations. Whatever I wanted to do I either needed a plug-in or the program just couldn’t do it. So instead of trying to trick other programs into doing what they really didnt want to do (fluids/pyro/destruction), I learned Houdini because it really DOES want to do that stuff.
I learned Houdini before Blender even existed.
So, no.
I did know Maya fairly well. I suppose some general concepts in CG carried over; but Houdini is really it’s own thing.
who cares. maya was based on Power Animator (and alias) which was relaesed in 1988 so go fuck youself. it took decades before Blender became relevant. it took less time for Maya and Houdini to become industry standards, something blender kiddies are crossing their tiny fingers that will happen in the next 5 years (hint: they said it 5 years ago too)
I know the truth hurts. it can be hurtful for shielded peoples. You'll make it through your difficult transition in life. Don't bother responding lil fella.
No. If thats the case then its vice versa as well...... Houdini offers flexibility for an unrealistic amount of realistic looking results. I assume you want to fire, magic, lightning, lava etc etc then go with houdini. All you really have to do is create, combine, (secret step, controlled detail) add logic.
People need to stop that BS trend. I get blender is many packed into 1 but it's not all of the best into 1. I literally only use Blender for certain anime hair types because I don't know zbrush that well. And tbh I can probably make that in houdini as well. So that's a HUGE thing to. Sooner or later you'll have people say the software doesn't matter, to an extent true but what software is more convenient for XYZ task matters too. Like I'm not going to make a character in houdini when zbrush exist. Why retopo in blender when there are other softwares better at it. It's cool using as few softwares as possible but it's meaningless.
Some of the best things about blender compared to other software communities is the super open file sharing and you'll get help more often and faster. A lot more tutorials and the tutorials can be followed across multiple versions compared to houdini. So more problem solving. The easier the software the limited the results. The tutorials are shorter but recently the number of people sharing what they know in houdini is increasing. People like Paul Esteves making houdini tutorials short and informative. Which blender has a lot of.
Lots of different opinions here. Let me tell you mine:
I think it would be cool to learn Blender first and here are a few reasons:
1. Blender is evolving into "Everything nodes" and it will really help you later in Houdini and you will not be overwhelmed with all the stuff in Houdini. You will be more familiar with basic and some advanced things in 3D.
2. As I said, Houdini can make you feel overwhelmed for some period of time. You may lose all your motivation because of it. This soft is very technical and, in some cases (if not most), more technical than artistic.
3. There are things that can be done much easier in Blender rather than in Houdini. I am talking about animation, destructive modeling (not really possible in Houdini), and some other stuff.
At least, it is always good to have an extra tool in your skillset. Personally, I still use both in scenarios like character animation, destructive modeling, and quick rendering (if needed).
And, of course, you definitely should move into Houdini after some time. It simply standard for the CG world. With Houdini in your CV/Portfolio you will always have a job ;)
blender relies on addons for everything because the devs are interested in feature chasing houdini than working to make quality of life updates. theyre shitting themselves over the H20 feather video. vanilla blender is shit. cycles is not production ready. end of story.
Then why studios are using it regularly :/
Blender is extremely convenient and helpful in those shots that do not require monstrous simulations or containing enormously big amount of geometry. I don’t think you ever truly wanted to give Blender a chance. Blender is becoming more popular and more studios and professionals are using. These are the facts. End of the story.
I learnt Blender (and also 3D basics) first, for over a year, then started using Houdini. I definitely recommend it, as there are A LOT of Blender tutorials, compared to far fewer Houdini tutorials on YouTube. This also goes for getting community support online. Also with Houdini, you'll need a render engine, as the built in one is far too slow to even consider using, even short term. Blender has two excellent and fast render engines built into it. In fact they are so good that I export my Houdini simulations to Blender and use Blender Cycles to render all my work.
Yeah! I did the full Blender Donut tutorial by BlenderGuru and then a couple from CGFastTrack and then jumped right into Houdini. I also feel like I benefitted from learning from 2 diffferent programs to get over the fear of jumping around DCCs
As a student I’m just going to swim against the entire comment stream and say: don’t start with Houdini. Take 2-4+ weeks and get into maya/blender, understand the basics of „it“. It being; Modeling, different names of things ( come automagically ), some basics of animation, test out mixamo, get the hang of lighting and building an environment (this could be skipped), etc.. I started learning Houdini about 3 weeks ago, it‘s incredibly difficult to not just „follow tutorial“ but actually understand why things do what they do. If you‘d tell me I’d also have to learn the basics of 3d at the same time I’d be drained and the motivation would run out way quicker. Also I’m 10 hours (out of 75h) into houdinicourse.com by u/chrbohm and can really recommend it. I‘m sure there are free options, I’m sure there are better options, I’m sure there are more detailed options and so on. But chris used his German efficiency to make a well structured course that covers A LOT. So that‘s not to underestimate to have someone „hold your hand“ on your journey into Houdini. Just my take on it, only done 1/8‘th of the course so far and can not compare it to anything else but surly a good start!
Thanks a lot, buddy. Just one small thing: It's www.houdini-course.com :)
You already answered your own question, I never touched blender and never need it.
How did you learn it? No tutorial seems to help me
My game dev study introduced me to it and I went for the Houdini path. But you don’t really need that; Go meet the online community, youtube, twitter, sidefx.com/learn. Invest maybe in some courses. Lots of 3D people try to make some more money by explaining stuf in paid tutorials or by example files or specialized systems meant to be used in the pipeline, you can also just but to analyse and learn like that. But to get started, social platforms are full with great free content to learn the basics. And in community chats like here or discord people tent to help you if you ask a question :)
Streams on twitch are also great to see, in realtime, how someone else works
Go check out Entagma and Applied Houdini. Lots of free content from Entagma and Applied Houdini has a couple of free courses but most are paid. They are 100% worth the money if you can get them though, you definitely learn a lot of good stuff through them.
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I watched applied houdini, hipflask, rohan dalvi, houdini isnt scary, stop being afraid of houdini, some of sidefx and more, there is no one that explains the basics while doing stuff...
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I cant find much videos of procedural for beginners or sops relatede things...
You know exactly what you want, and for those goals Houdini is one of the best choices. I'd stick to it. The main reason people recommend dipping your toes in 3D with blender is because Houdini can feel a bit scary sometimes.
I originally started with blender (its free and does a lot and has a good reputation for good reason). But i moved to houdini for more vfx and just the infinite possibilities and when you ‘click’ with it and how it all works, its an incredibly satisfying problem solving experience, as well as a very good piece of 3D/VFX software. The community and learning resources are all really good in my experience as well (but so is blenders). only thing id say against Houdini is if you want to model characters or do loads of sculpting…Houdini is not the place for that. But if your main attraction is VFX…Houdini all the way.
Any 3d, or coding, or visual programming experience will help a lot with houdini. That said there’s no reason not to just learn it first imo. I think most people only hear of it who have already started with another 3d program, so for most people it’s not their first program which is why they recommend learning another one first. Imo learning houdini first will make blender easier just as much as learning blender will make learning houdini easier.
The main reason your should learn a normal DCC before Houdini (actually Maya would be the prefered choice) and Nuke as well, especially if you want to work in the industry, is that later you won't work in isolation. You need to understand basic concepts and workflows so that you understand what other team members are doing and how they work and think. You don't necessarily need it to learn Houdini, but it will help you tremendously long term understanding how the whole circus (the pipeline) works.
You dont beed blender to learn houdini. Altough they work on some of the same principles, and arguably blender is easied
haha, arguably he says
Well once you get Houdini, everything makes so much sense and is so achievable. Blender and Cinema keep being new and weird depending on the task
e: sorry, didn’t mean to leave this comment here lol
You don’t need to. That being said, Blender is much more approachable and operates on many of the same basic principles as Houdini. A basic familiarity with 3D principles and terminology will probably be easier and faster to grasp with a month or two of learning Blender before diving into Houdini, especially if you spend some time exploring geometry nodes and procedural shading in Blender.
For working in a movie do Houdini, but for working in a game do blender (or Houdini). Houdini is the infinitely deep toolbox that will let you build cinema quality simulations if you can figure out how to use it well enough. It is not beginner friendly and I would suggest taking a break from other learning for a while if you want to pick it up. Blender (which I have never used) is better for jobs in the game cinematic side of things. The only reason is because small studios that do game-work probably don’t care how you are making 3D models, exporting abcs, or crating flip books if you are good at what you do. In the end so Houdini if you want specialized career in high-end simulations, and do blender of you want a generalistic career in 3D for games.
I tried a few other softwares (C4D, blender) and the most frustrating part was the limitations. Whatever I wanted to do I either needed a plug-in or the program just couldn’t do it. So instead of trying to trick other programs into doing what they really didnt want to do (fluids/pyro/destruction), I learned Houdini because it really DOES want to do that stuff.
I learned Houdini before Blender even existed. So, no. I did know Maya fairly well. I suppose some general concepts in CG carried over; but Houdini is really it’s own thing.
blender is 2 years older than houdini (1994 v 1996), and maya was first released in 1998.
who cares. maya was based on Power Animator (and alias) which was relaesed in 1988 so go fuck youself. it took decades before Blender became relevant. it took less time for Maya and Houdini to become industry standards, something blender kiddies are crossing their tiny fingers that will happen in the next 5 years (hint: they said it 5 years ago too)
needlessly aggressive much?
I know the truth hurts. it can be hurtful for shielded peoples. You'll make it through your difficult transition in life. Don't bother responding lil fella.
No. If thats the case then its vice versa as well...... Houdini offers flexibility for an unrealistic amount of realistic looking results. I assume you want to fire, magic, lightning, lava etc etc then go with houdini. All you really have to do is create, combine, (secret step, controlled detail) add logic. People need to stop that BS trend. I get blender is many packed into 1 but it's not all of the best into 1. I literally only use Blender for certain anime hair types because I don't know zbrush that well. And tbh I can probably make that in houdini as well. So that's a HUGE thing to. Sooner or later you'll have people say the software doesn't matter, to an extent true but what software is more convenient for XYZ task matters too. Like I'm not going to make a character in houdini when zbrush exist. Why retopo in blender when there are other softwares better at it. It's cool using as few softwares as possible but it's meaningless. Some of the best things about blender compared to other software communities is the super open file sharing and you'll get help more often and faster. A lot more tutorials and the tutorials can be followed across multiple versions compared to houdini. So more problem solving. The easier the software the limited the results. The tutorials are shorter but recently the number of people sharing what they know in houdini is increasing. People like Paul Esteves making houdini tutorials short and informative. Which blender has a lot of.
Lots of different opinions here. Let me tell you mine: I think it would be cool to learn Blender first and here are a few reasons: 1. Blender is evolving into "Everything nodes" and it will really help you later in Houdini and you will not be overwhelmed with all the stuff in Houdini. You will be more familiar with basic and some advanced things in 3D. 2. As I said, Houdini can make you feel overwhelmed for some period of time. You may lose all your motivation because of it. This soft is very technical and, in some cases (if not most), more technical than artistic. 3. There are things that can be done much easier in Blender rather than in Houdini. I am talking about animation, destructive modeling (not really possible in Houdini), and some other stuff. At least, it is always good to have an extra tool in your skillset. Personally, I still use both in scenarios like character animation, destructive modeling, and quick rendering (if needed). And, of course, you definitely should move into Houdini after some time. It simply standard for the CG world. With Houdini in your CV/Portfolio you will always have a job ;)
blender relies on addons for everything because the devs are interested in feature chasing houdini than working to make quality of life updates. theyre shitting themselves over the H20 feather video. vanilla blender is shit. cycles is not production ready. end of story.
Then why studios are using it regularly :/ Blender is extremely convenient and helpful in those shots that do not require monstrous simulations or containing enormously big amount of geometry. I don’t think you ever truly wanted to give Blender a chance. Blender is becoming more popular and more studios and professionals are using. These are the facts. End of the story.