[chefandy]

I’m setting aside UE because Blender isn’t and was never trying to be a game engine. When it comes to high-end physics sims of any kind— particles, pyro, rbd, liquid, cloth, hair, etc– blender isn’t close to Houdini. The blender toolkit will get ‘something’, but the Houdini toolkit will get you ‘anything.’ More broadly, it’s so easy (well, “easy” like you don’t have to modify the program source. This stuff is going to be complex and fussy no matter what) to infinitely control absolutely anything using everything from node-based no-code stuff (VOPs)that compiles down to performant machine code, to their built-in c-like for performant calculations in complex networks (vex), to popping in nodes where you can write your own openCL if you really wanted to, all animatable using anything from key frames to their built-in non-time-bound math system (CHOPs… I know… the names…) originally built to process wave-level audio. If you’re clever enough, you can even use all of that to drive your geometry, audio and shaders to some extent simultaneously, without (textual) code. The geometry nodes in blender are cool, and they seem to be developing them the right way – ensuring quality rather than racing for feature parity with bifrost or Houdini or wherever — but last I checked you couldn’t even animate their parameters. Huge progress, a great tool, and many people’s preferred tool for modeling. Frankly you wouldn’t catch me dead sculpting in Houdini, and Houdini has a way to go before their compositor is on par with Blender’s, even if the procedural bent makes it more useful for some unusual use cases now. But for the really deep procedural stuff and simulations, anything involving volumes, and also fitting into complex pipelines, we’re talking etch-a-sketch vs oil paints. Imagine if blender started as a purely procedural tool and only focused on that use case? The differences would go so much deeper than the feature list would let on.

I think the differences are a lot less significant with other modeling-focused DCCs like Maya, Max, and C4D. All great programs in their own right. Maya really is an incredible tool for character animation, C4D is so killer for motion graphics type stuff… but they’re all much closer to blender for their intended use cases.

[pabs3]

Blender Game Engine was a thing at one point, died a long time ago though, but now has a maintained fork!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_Game_Engine

[chefandy]

That’s cool — never heard of it. I’ll have to check it out.

[chefandy]

Oh and I forgot to mention that it’s all glued together with python, which replaced their previous non-compiled scripting language based on csh. (No shit. Yes, that csh. I do believe the first version of Houdini’s precursor came out in the late 80s. Wasn’t tcsh the application that spawned the turn-of-phrase ‘considered harmful?’) You can do pretty much anything with Python— not just glue work and making procedural parameters. But from what I gather, it’s not nearly as performant as vex or VOPs for doing per-particle or per-voxel operations when you’ve got more than a few million. I’ve never pushed Houdini’s Python that far, though, so that might be old news. Vex and VOPs are stricter on type, but are still garbage collected, etc so I don’t know where the efficiency lies.