In the course of building the launch pad for my rocketship, I have built two very simple tools in Houdini, which are called HDA (Houdini Digital Asset). One creates simple straight ones that have options how high, how long, and the thicknesses of the top bar and middle bar, and how many vertical bars in the breadth of a metre. The other creates railings that follow the shape of a curve such as those found in staircases. These tools have been an immense help in laying down geometry quickly, and to control as many aspects of the object as I want.
While I find Houdini’s basic functions to be relatively awkward compared to more sophisticated modelling apps like LightWave or Maya, its true procedural workflow is such a mind-blowing tool in itself. Granted that it does take more time to do simple stuff, the benefits of making mass revisions on highly detailed meshes is easy-peasy. For example, the image pictured above includes one of my launch towers. Based on how I’ve set it up procedurally, I can not only specify how many floors I want on-the-fly, but I can just as easily change the height of each floor, and that, in turn, changes the geometry of the stairs to accommodate for the adjustment. If I had to do such adjustments in Maya or LightWave, it would be a rather tedious job, especially if I’ve made critical modelling choices beforehand, which usually happens anyway.
I think, overall, the significant thing about Houdini is that I’m having loads of fun again which I never had when I was learning Maya. I had fun learning LightWave and it was always a friendly package to use both as a hobby and professionally, but it has been increasingly a frustration as time goes on. I do wish that I could slow down a bit and start learning more about the tools and writing some Python in Houdini, but I do have a commitment; I have been turning my head away from tool-making tutorials and avoiding complex solutions. But hopefully, when this short is done, I can start delving into some of the workflow issues that have come up. I already have a list of tools I want to create.