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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Houdini is an incredibly cool tool: https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/

One of the things I most dislike about tools like Blender is that it can be really hard to go back to earlier stages of the process and make adjustments. Most changes are destructive, even though they don't really need to be. I follow lots of digital artists on Twitter and some of them use Houdini, and the kind of stuff they can generate is just mindblowing.

I'd try it out myself if it weren't for the price; I've always been drawn to procedural creation as a bridge between what a person imagines and what they can get a computer to render.

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For messing around, Apprentice version is free and can do pretty much anything the full version (FX) can, except render in insane resolution. Also, Indie version is cheap (~$200/year).

Some people do completely non-destructive modelling in Blender using its modifier stack. You can see an example of that here: https://youtu.be/Atw16f8wZ6Y

I'm also a big fan of Houdini, though, and would recommend the free edition to anyone wanting to learn. It's the most fully featured piece of free software I've ever used. I almost can't believe that it's free, it's so good!

I think Houdini is a different kind of beast.

You have software like 3ds Max, Maya, C4D, Blender and others. And then you have Houdini.

But you can use Blender more procedural with the modifier stack. And there are great add-ons like Boxcutter: https://blendermarket.com/products/hard-ops--boxcutter-ultim...

Someone in a recent discussion about randomly-generated spaceships in Blender linked this: https://github.com/aachman98/Sorcar

Not terribly familiar with how things work in Houdini (and only dabbling in Blender a few times), but that's been compared to it.

That looks pretty cool.

Is the price really the blocker? How much does it cost? I looked at the indie edition and it seemed affordable. They also have a free edition: https://www.sidefx.com/buy/#houdini-free.

Affordable, but a little hard to justify as a casual user who just wants to mess around and doesn't really plan on building anything complete

It’s completely free for the casual user who just wants to mess around, as long as they don’t use it for commercial work. Almost all features supported, except external renderers and certain geometry exports.

There are some great free tutorials here: https://entagma.com/

It's not the price that's the problem. It's that it is closed source, and therefore any work you produce is on a guaranteed path to bitrot.

Isn't the final rendered product portable? Also, I'd imagine you could always export the necessary assets into a format less prone to bitrot.

I don't know of any format that supports full parametric modeling the way Houdini does.

As the OP said, parametric modelling is what makes Houdini so nice.

And if you want any chance to rework anything in a project - say - 10 years later, exporting to a "baked" format is a dead end.

What's preventing the development of an open model/data format for parametric modelling?

Because every feature and parameter would have to be baked into the format and every editor would have to offer those same features and no more.

There's always a trade-off between editability and fidelity with any format. Non-destructive stacks of modifiers bring that trade-off into sharp relief.

Yes.. not only offer the exact same features but any software that tries to implement the format would have to agree on the exact algorithms for the transformations represented by each procedural step. Any error in any one of those algorithms would cascade into subsequent steps and could generate a completely different final product

Some amount of variation is desirable in any artistic endeavor.

I agree, the lack of parametric modeling is one of the most frustrating thing about blender (that and the super weird multi-object select/deselect workflow)

The modifier stack is, to a limited extent, a flaccid ersatz for full-blown parametric, but it's light-years away from what Houdini can do.

>One of the things I most dislike about tools like Blender is that it can be really hard to go back to earlier stages of the process and make adjustments.

I do not think it is a big drawback of Blender since other tools such as Maya and 3ds Max are also destructive.

By "tools like Blender" I meant the entire category.

Links to artists you recommend?

Some names + Twitter handles: Ben Watts (http://twitter.com/benwattsdesign), Simon Holmedal (http://twitter.com/Sholmedal), Serjan Burlak (http://twitter.com/biogenicdesign), Rohan Dalvi (http://twitter.com/RohanCreates), Tim van Helsdingen (http://twitter.com/TvanHelsdingen)

Also, I had this little side project a while back: http://twitter.com/tobyliad (shameless plug :))

Here's a pretty awesome one: https://twitter.com/qornflex/status/1195701316418490368

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