In short, Houdini Indie has become an essential toolset in my workflow over the last year and half since I first began using it during Summer 2017 and I highly recommend it to all 3d artists who desire fine-grained control over titanic forces both big and small.

If you want to know why I think that, read on...

Years ago, my grandfather worked with wood and had many customized tools in his workshop.

He had huge machines like lathes, band saws, sanders, routers, planers along with all manner of assorted hand-held power tools and hand-held manual tools to handle just about any implementation issue he would run into while making his various furnitures and wooden art things. As a kid, I would ask him what the purpose of each one was, and he would respond with a story that usually included how the piece of wood he was holding in his hand at the time had made it through a few of the machines already before arriving at the current one. Anyways, you get the picture.

You see, for me, Houdini is like a huge futuristic workshop with technology that seems both familiar and alien. At times, I just run in, grab what I need and run out. But as of late, I've been setting up a new workshop *inside* of Houdini. It's a fantastic tool for building workflows and for automation. It's also a fine tool for procedural and/or node-based modeling and baking and custom data processing and texturing and animation and simulations and on and on.

Pros
- node and graph based workflows everywhere for all the things
- VEX wrangles ftw (think flat C with well thought out API access to all the things, oh, and it scales well too)
- Python integration - 'nuff said
- robust data import/export - supports handle nearly anything you can throw at it and same with export
- powerful and flexible tools and workflows available for all the things
- highly optimized application, in my opinion -- uses all the resources it can get its hand on too
- it can and will use all available resources
- it has a rich and complex vernacular
- endless ways to compose solutions - customize all the things

Cons
- it has been a steep learning curve for me, your mileage may vary
- it can and will use all available resources
- it has a rich and complex vernacular
- endless ways to compose solutions - sometimes too many options can lead to wasted exploration time but that xp can be converted into growth if you talk to the right NPC :P

Yeah, it's like that. It's just like that.

It's a marvelous tool and I expect it to become vastly more powerful and popular over the next few years.

A bit of background on me... I've been a blenderhead since the early 2000s, dabbled in 3dsmax before that (3d studio 0.9 and up by Yost Group actually), also bits of graphics coding on/off over the years (c/c++/python) but lately my focus has been experimental digital art.

And with that said, Houdini is slowly taking over deskspace in my virtual workshop. Of course, it still has to share with Blender and Unreal Engine because these three tools are a powerful combo that I'll be exploring for years to come.

Go grab Apprentice for free today, find a tutorial and make a thing!