[HN Gopher] Houdini Engine for Unreal and Unity Now Free
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Houdini Engine for Unreal and Unity Now Free
Author : doppp
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-02-26 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sidefx.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sidefx.com)
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Epic put a bunch of money into the company behind Houdini I
| believe. I'd wager that's the bigger reason for this happening.
|
| I don't feel I fully understand what Houdini can do for me.
| didip wrote:
| What does this engine do?
| pzone wrote:
| Houdini is a package for authoring procedural content
| generation tools. You can construct tools in Houdini like a
| building generator or level generator and no longer need to use
| up licenses to include them in your software at runtime.
| gideon13 wrote:
| Clearly a response to the new node editor in Blender 2.92 which
| threatens Houdini.
| DethNinja wrote:
| Blender needs to spend at least 10 more years to threaten
| Houdini, Houdini handles far more stuff than geometry nodes.
|
| I mean don't get me wrong, I would love blender to be a direct
| competitor to Houdini but there is a long long way to there.
| erichocean wrote:
| I use both professionally, and Blender isn't even close. But
| I do love the direction it's going, for sure.
| lfowles wrote:
| I doubt it. This is only for the engine integrations, not the
| core software.
| sho_hn wrote:
| It's fun to watch from the sidelines how Blender, as an OSS
| product, is just plain winning. It'll drown out everything but
| specialized tools and/or products that are essentially just
| supply chain to particular large operations very soon (i.e.
| customers who need staff to interact with to do complex
| integration).
|
| It seems to be down to economies of scale - the business model
| of something like Maya, moving a small amount of "units" at
| high margins essentially, has been relatively easy to surpass
| in volume. Get the governance right, make sound technical
| decisions and ... you can't really compete with it without
| emulating it.
|
| I don't say this with any particular glee. This niche genre of
| proprietary software has always appealed to me as a confluence
| of some amazing complex problem-solving and UX innovation - I'm
| still so impressed by Modo, for example.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Does anyone care to comment why this is happening with
| Blender vs. Maya/Cinema 4D/Houdini, but it hasn't happened
| with The GIMP vs. Photoshop, or Ardour vs. Logic/Pro
| Tools/Ableton, or Godot vs. Unity/Unreal?
|
| It seems like overall the pattern is for the commercial
| options to be significantly more popular (and arguably more
| featureful) than the open source options. Why has Blender
| been able to reverse this pattern?
| johnfn wrote:
| I honestly believe that Godot will overtake Unity one day.
| Unity has a huge amount of momentum, but it kind of feels
| to me like the difference between JQuery and React right
| when React was a fledgling library. While Unity has a lot
| of entrenched developers that have been using it for years,
| my (unfounded) opinion is that new developers entering the
| gamedev scene will pick Godot over Unity more frequently,
| and that will bear out in the long run (years).
|
| I know this is kind of unrelated to your point, though :)
| Additionally, I use Ableton all the time and I don't see
| any FOSS alternatives that hold a candle to it. Then again,
| I could be one of those entrenched devs just like those I
| said exist working with Unity!
| sho_hn wrote:
| I think it's a lot of little things.
|
| - Blender came out of commercial, and the community was
| never really anti-commercial. Lots of classic FOSS
| communities have trouble identifying with paid development
| for example, worrying it will lead to a form of classicism
| in the community, etc. Blender, OTOH, tried to make sure
| there's core staff doing it fulltime basically from the
| get-go, I think. This makes a lot of stuff happen - taking
| care of not-fun things, having stable contact points,
| professionalism, doing good fundraising, etc.
|
| - Blender took dogfooding seriously, with their open movie
| projects
|
| - Blender took user research seriously, running events and
| inviting artists over and watching them use the software
|
| - Blender did good community management, with Blender
| Artists and other initiatives
|
| - In Blender's area integration, automation, tooling are
| all very complex, and they made some good key decisions,
| e.g. adopting Python for scripting just when Python was
| becoming the default programming language for non-
| programmers
|
| - Because the application domain Blender is in is so
| complex, training is important, and the competition
| probably underestimated making their products affordable
| for teaching institutions (call me out if wrong, I am not
| as confident on this point). Blender supported creation of
| training materials pretty well, too
|
| They simply got a lot of things right. Projects that paid
| attention (e.g. Krita) are also blossoming.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Price point may be another important factor. 2D Design
| apps like Photoshop are not as pricy as the 3D
| counterparts, last time I checked. Hence there's more
| motivation to find an alternative to Maya, Max for the
| hobbyist then there is to replace photoshop.
| pzone wrote:
| These days Maya and Max are the same price as Photoshop -
| $250/y vs $20/mo. Incidentally Houdini is also about the
| same, $279/y.
| robenkleene wrote:
| These are good points. Going one step further: Do you
| think the other projects I mentioned (Godot/The
| Gimp/Ardour) could replicate Blender's success in their
| own industries by similarly making better decisions? (I
| don't have an opinion on this, just curious if you think
| Blender was _also_ successful for reasons that would be
| outside of the control of these other apps to replicate.)
| katmannthree wrote:
| Not the person you replied to but here's my take for the
| two that I can comment on:
|
| 1) Godot: No. Godot is doing pretty well with the
| resources they have. Making a 2D/3D game engine is an
| incredibly complex task and they have only a handful of
| people writing code. To compete with unreal and unity
| they'd have to have a ton of funding, a layer of FOSS-
| competent management (a somewhat rare thing), and many
| more developers.
|
| 2) Gimp: Yes but that will never happen. Gimp has a
| handful of issues. They're chained to a difficult
| framework and a large amount of the value they provide as
| a tool comes from their plugin library so they can't just
| start ripping things out. They also have rather
| questionable branding (both in the name and the
| splashscreens, especially the ones in development
| versions) and a hearty resistance towards throwing on
| even a veneer of professionalism. Whether or not they
| should change to fit what the rest of the world considers
| appropriate is a philosophical question I'm not touching,
| but the effect of their not doing so is pretty evident.
|
| Krita (a very well managed project in comparison) has
| basically eaten Gimp's lunch for a lot of workflows and
| will continue to do so while gimp withers away (which has
| basically already happened, gimp's GTK3 builds are only
| just now about to release, 10 years after the first GTK3
| release and right after GTK4 dropped -- bear in mind that
| GTK was originally developed as a custom widget toolkit
| specifically for gimp).
| mcdevilkiller wrote:
| Curious how "The GIMP" is so behind the "GIMP Toolkit".
| Bekwnn wrote:
| Gimp is (I think) a struggle and ui/ux nightmare to most
| people still.
|
| Software like Clip Studio Paint, SAI, and Krita have
| definitely taken a bite out of the digital painting
| audience for photoshop.
|
| I'm not sure how good the alternatives are for photo
| editing/manipulation.
| karyb wrote:
| Affinity Photo has some traction. They have several good
| products, and momentum started when Adobe went
| subscription and they stayed perm license (with a
| reasonable cost).
| benbristow wrote:
| Affinity Photo (and their other products) are great. And
| for PS25 with COVID discount is a no-brainer. An actual
| alternative to Photoshop (and InDesign/Illustrator).
|
| GIMP is still an unusable mess. I've tried so many times
| but it's just too different to the industry standard.
|
| The best change they made was add a single-window mode
| but it's still nowhere near Photoshop.
| callesgg wrote:
| Blender is simply as good or better than the alternatives.
|
| While the open source image, audio and video editors are
| not better than the alternatives.
|
| Sure there are other factors to. There are always other
| factors. But given enough time the best product will win.
| lattalayta wrote:
| In my opinion, a lot of this stems from the UI/UX focused
| improvements they made with Blender 2.80. Before that,
| Blender had some weird UX patterns (like right-click to
| select) that were different enough from other packages that
| it was hard to get into. It was always frustrating that it
| on its surface it looked like the other 3D packages, but it
| didn't ever work the way I wanted it to. Also, they coupled
| those UI/UX updates with a large focus on polishing their
| realtime viewport renderer. With better UX patterns, and a
| fancy new viewport, it made demos and onboarding much more
| intriguing.
|
| That's the same way I had always felt about GIMP or
| Audacity - the windowing system, icons, layout, and other
| tools never quite felt natural or intuitive and it never
| made me want to get into it more.
| Thaxll wrote:
| How is it actually winning, I work in the industry I don't
| see Blender used but actually the same old "proprietary"
| tools ( Max ect ... )
| aseipp wrote:
| It may seem strange but when discussing things like this
| ("This new thing is going to win") I'm always reminded of
| the response people here on HN had to Adobe going to
| subscription-only. There were pages and pages of comments
| about how it was disrespectful, obviously dumb, CS2 was so
| good they didn't even _need_ a subscription, how they were
| just opening themselves up to their enemies who would now
| win, and how because of all that, Adobe would clearly be
| regretting such a disastrous decision, they 'll see, just
| wait for them to rue the day. Surprise! Adobe is over 10x
| more valuable than it was 10 years ago, and is still the
| 900lb gorilla in the room.
|
| I suspect Blender is "winning" in this area in the same way
| that Adobe was failing: in the minds of people on this
| website, and nowhere else.
| chabad360 wrote:
| Google "studios that use blender".
| mishac wrote:
| The number of studios _not_ using blender is much larger.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| I've seen a surprising number of resumes that are listing
| it come across my desk recently. I don't think it will
| occupy the same place in the tool stack that say, Linux
| does for IT, but adoption is definitely on the uptick. I
| suspect that this has a lot to do with rendering tech
| moving more towards the realtime side of things for many
| applications these days. Blender has a very good realtime
| viewport, so if you are delivering content into that sort
| of an environment, it's a natural fit for some things.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| I wonder if this is in any way related to Blender's new node-
| focused workflow tools.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Is the Houdini Engine useful without having purchased a copy of
| Houdini?
| marcodiego wrote:
| As in beer?
| fctorial wrote:
| As in candy.
| lfowles wrote:
| Houdini is an exceptional tool! It took me a few tries to get
| through this press release... this only seems to change things
| for companies using the _engine plugins_ that make >$100k.
| erichocean wrote:
| Yes, though a major annoyance is that it's only _the official
| SideFX plugins_ that are free, not Houdini Engine itself (the
| API). So you can 't write your own specialized tools.
|
| I ran into this recently when we needed an interactive
| rendering technique that Houdini doesn't support. The Houdini
| Engine API would have been perfect, but we use Indie and it
| doesn't support anything but the official plugins.
|
| Instead, I'm writing HDK nodes in C++ that accomplish the same
| thing by copying to shared memory in a subprocess running Optix
| 7. It works, but it's ugly as hell. Oh well.
| lfowles wrote:
| Ugh. Maybe this was a move to simplify licensing, I hate
| having to dig around to see what features are gated
| especially if there are caveats like API access vs Official
| Plugins only.
| wintorez wrote:
| I guess this is a "game changer"...
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