Hello from Houdini (and other future plans)

I'm going to try and keep this as short as possible since I'm really not a fan of excessive text-only posts.

Long story short, I've been a CINEMA 4D user for close to 15 years now.

Most of my 3D artwork has been made possible through the use of C4D. I know the application inside and out, and have spent considerable amounts of time and effort learning all the intricacies, finding out where all the bugs lay, how to work around those, etc, etc. I've written my own plugins for it- sometimes to fix broken functionality, other times to implement new workflows that I found appealing. I pretty much live and breath C4D these days, but unfortunately I think my time with it has finally come to an end.

Over the past couple of months, I've started to encounter some pretty hard limitations that are preventing me from moving forwards with my artwork. This has to do with a couple of deep seated issues in the way C4D handles deformers and skinning, but also several long standing bugs that still haven't been fixed in even the latest versions. Due to a lack of commitment and improvements made by MAXON, C4D has largely turned into a "what you see is what you get" package, and unfortunately WYSIWYG just isn't cutting it for me anymore.

So, I have made the decision to switch to something better. That application is called Houdini. It is a much more capable program (that is actively being maintained and improved by SES), and appears to contain all the tools I need as well as a bunch of stuff I wish I always had.

Since I don't like leaving people hanging and things are probably going to get a bit jumbled up around here, I figured I should probably make a quick post about this and some of my future plans:

1) I will be spending as much time as possible learning Houdini and moving all my old assets over to it. This is going to take some time and effort since I am effectively starting from scratch again, however a lot of this is just moving data around and adapting existing systems to a new paradigm- so I don't expect it will take that long in the end.

2) I am not planning on moving my old poolside scene over. Instead, I want to build out the full pool hall room as I had originally envisioned it, which I believe will serve as a nice introductory project to Houdini and allow me to explore some more creative camera angles in the future (plus VR renders!).

3) Jessica and Vanessa will be coming too (obviously), though I highly suspect I will have to rebuild a good chunk of their rigs to take full advantage of Houdini's cutting edge technology (in comparison, C4D's tools are about 10 years out of date). While I am doing this, I fully intend on ensuring that they are made properly inflatable this time around, and capable of expanding up between all the various sizes shown in the lastest post about Jessica.

4) After this is done, I want to start authoring new props/characters/outfits/environments again and spending some time exploring the universe that I've written up for my current OCs and future characters. This will likely involve the production of several new image packs, albeit on a much more regular occasion with the help of Houdini's asset management features and scene pipeline tools (something C4D sorely lacks in any stable fashion).

In the meantime, I would probably expect more technical posts than usual as I work my way through Houdini's user interface and start to figure things out. I still have all my old C4D assets and those work just fine, so I will continue to make content with those- but I will no longer be investing any additional resources into building C4D-specific assets or developing C4D-specific workflows.

I would also like to apologize for any delays that this may cause in the future. This is a bit of a huge step for me, but I feel like my 3D career is being actively limited by C4D at this point and I'm not sure what else to do. I am committed to this Patreon account and the stable production of expansion/inflation related content, but for the sake of my own sanity and the continued evolution of my skill set, I feel as though this is something I need to handle sooner rather than later.