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Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

> In the span of five years, you wouldn't be caught dead using it over Maya. Now, its visa versa.

Agreed on Maya, but Houdini's node based workflow has ruined me on essentially any other piece of 3D/CAD software. As a programmer it is so obviously the right way to do 95% of the things...

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I think the Maya thing is hyperbole, I just couldn't justify the price tag after I got out of school, but it's still def a standard.

But really, as much as I like blender and open source, you hit the nail on the head, Houdini is on another level of awesomeness. Basically functional modelling done right.

I just wish that it had as good of tools for NURBS as it does for polygons, but at that point it basically becomes Rhino/Grasshopper, and that's not really what Houdini's for. I also kind of wish that VEX wasn't a thing, I don't really want to have to learn an entire mini language to get into the guts. I try to do all of that in VOPs unless it gets complicated.

Houdini has always intrigued me. Is there a good video/article I can look at to get a good overview of the powerful aspects of the node based stuff? (without having to spend dozens of hours learning the program!)

I don't know of any good videos, off the top of my head, but at a high level, all operations that one performs (creating geometry, editing objects, etc) are compositions of functions (nodes). So, after a long editing session, you can pop up the node graph and see exactly what operations/functions were performed and in what order. This allows one to programmatically modify the chain of operations later, or to package up the session as a script that can be shared with other users. You can also easily write your own bits of functionality and inject them into the sequence of function calls. It is super powerful, makes workflows reproducible, and way more.

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