Performance Comparison of Houdini and SoftImage

ICE vs VOPs a performance comparison

The author of this blog entry describes how SoftImage's new feature called ICE compares with Houdini's VOPs. Both applications now have a node network, and the author shows some examples of them with some screen shots of tests he runs. These five tests are empirical in the sense that they are experiments that measure the time it takes to complete certain tasks. By presenting this timing data, the writer strikes a neutral tone while still encouraging the reader to make a value judgement about SoftImage's performance wins. While the differences in time he presents are in the range of seconds, it seems reasonable that such a performance improvement could build up to hours for renders with a large number of frames and calulcations. I haven't worked with Houdini or SoftImage for several months now, but this comparison still looked interesting.

High Speed Robotic Hand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdHY26E2jc

from Ishikawa Komuro Lab, University of Tokyo:

Concept

Interactions in the real world (not only physical but also social and psychological interactions) are inherently parallel phenomena. By constructing models and engineering systems that take into account such parallelism, one can expect a better understanding of the real world as well as enhanced performance of systems when dealing with practical applications. These fundamental considerations lead us to concentrate on parallel processing for sensory information. Four main related topics are currently being explored in Ishikawa-Komuro Laboratory:

1. Sensor Fusion theory and implementation in engineering systems;
2. Dynamic Image Control Dynamic control of image based on high-speed visual information processing;
3. Massively parallel image processing through a Vision Chip, which is capable of realizing high-speed real-time vision tasks on the basis of VLSI technology, and
4. Meta Perception concerns ways of capturing, manipulating and presenting information which is normally inaccessible to humans and machines.
5. (Past research on Optics in Computing: architectures that combine the advantages of optics and electronics to realize enormous computing throughput)

Another Demo of Importing Data into Houdini

There is another demo of importing data into Houdini shown on the Houdini Community Blog. It demonstrates an program using OpenCV to send out data that Houdini then uses to change perspective of a camera. I don't have time to pursue this right now, but perhaps some time later it could be useful for something else.