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I really want to learn Houdini. Their pricing model is not even that bad (just 200 USD/year if you are indie), but even that is a hurdle when the alternative (Blender) is free and so good (or just plain better) for the 98% of what I want to do. Also, I do manage to crash Houdini more often than I manage to crash Blender, so there is that....

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Different tools for different purposes. Blender is in the Maya paradigm, and doing pretty well in that. Houdini is more like a DSL for computer graphics and can end up being both the most low level and the most high level tool in the industry. There's no mystery about why the industry has mostly settled on Houdini + one other complimentary DCC.

Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly.

I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun

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