This might take me a while.I'm nearly 40, picked up Houdini about 1.5 years ago, after using C4D for about 10 years straight, have found only one reason to go back to C4D, and that is to use its excellent toon shader. I'm only 32, but I have difficulty retaining information compared to my youth. C4D also doesn't really understand point clouds or extra attributes brought over from Houdini, so you will have to do more work than if you just stayed in Houdini. Unless your work requires you to use C4D or you are doing a lot of quick mograph work for television advertising, it is not as good a match for the weaknesses of Houdini as Modo or Blender or Maya. Where C4D excels is ease of use for beginners (with a very logical menu system), speed in creating simple mograph effects, probably the best NPR rendering engine out there, a much easier hair system than in Houdini, and great stability both in Windows and Mac. But if you are interested in a great non procedural modeler, C4D only fair, and lags behind other 3D apps as mentioned above. Houdini is a lot slower for quickly adding edge loops, extrudes, etc. I modeled a human hand, for instance, and had to create a lot of “edit” nodes, which is basically destructive modeling. Where Houdini is not the strongest is destructive modeling. You are dabbling into a second program where you go right into the most complicated parts to start with. The biggest mistake I see people make is to try to bring over a complicated scene from Houdini into C4D where they really don't understand how that scene was created or what it is doing. It is hard to be very productive not really understanding Houdini. Maintaining competence in multiple 3D programs is possible, but generally you will get further really learning one well. The particle system in C4D is so poor, almost everyone buys a third party program to do it, and that cannot do decent fire or smoke. The mograph features are great for adding quick effects, but look a bit stereotyped.Ĥ. Modo, Blender, and Maya are better modeling apps.ģ. For example, if you do a sweep nurb and then want to create a branch, you will have to make the sweep editable, destroying any procedural features. Its procedural features fall apart when you want to do serious modeling.

Xpresso is very inefficient, and you often need to cobble together various nodes just to do a simple expression.Ģ. Its character rigging tools are behind most of its competitors. The constraint system coupled with rigging gets glacially slow and does not have internal methods to prevent gimble lock. It can get quite complicated when you try to use attributes to control things like color. It does allow you to be somewhat productive while not fully understanding 3D concepts, so there is a lot of bad topology on commercial models. C4D is more of a hub for other software than a complete program.Ģ. C4D is quite expensive to maintain, if you include yearly maintenance, a third party renderer, x-particles, realflow, etc. The issues in using C4D as your main modeling program and Houdini as a supplemental are:ġ.

Mograph effects are easily replicated in Houdini. My experience is similar to Midphase, except that I came from XSI before C4D. It is much more likely that one would move a model from C4D into Houdini than vice versa.

Realflow smoke cinema 4d