Houdini

What do you like best?

Fracturing, Destruction Effects, and Dynamics for character, prop, and environment interaction. Fracturing is very robust. Bullet and RBD are also very powerful. There's a lot of support from community users. I am a Maya character artist and use Zbrush. So there's no Zbrush sculpt interface and once you use Houdini it makes sense why there isn't. Everything is node trees. Once you get use to it, proceduralism is very logical. However, it's not an "artsy" kind of editing. So to learn Houdini you should use it a lot. Go specifically after the effect you want with a tutorial which in my case, would be hero character breaking things. For me, it's not like I can just make up workflows, since I don't code. So I have to use step by step tutorials. There's a huge surge of tutorials so that's not a problem. There's a lot of user sharing "Hip" or project files. There are some automatic buttons but most tutorial shy away from them. You don't have to be a coder to use Houdini but some simple codes are common among most tutorials. I'm not a programmer and I have learned to do most of what I need in a few months.

What do you dislike?

Very Technical. It's not artistically intuitive. Also, some of the export options like alembic should be more direct and inuitive. Don't expect to paint or draw. It's procedural so you have to use nodes. However, it works well. Once you have something built it's easy to make very flexible changes.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Houdini has a very technical approach. Be prepared to dedicate time, practice, and patience.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It's great for fracturing and dynamic effects. Bullet solver for Rigid Body dynamics are very powerful.