I thought that a few questions have come up enough that I start one of these pages, though I’m not sure if it’s worthwhile just yet. But there’s no harm in putting one up anyway!

Q: Why did you switch from using Blender to using Houdini?
A:I made the switch to Houdini because I want to go into production level work. If you look at the major studios’ production pipeline, Blender just isn’t a part of it, nor is it something that studios are hiring for. Also, after using Houdini I realize the power behind it with possibilities I can’t even begin to imagine. Of course, the non-commercial version is for non-commercial use only and the full commercial version is $8,000 (so you get what you pay for). But as I want to learn this software to get a job in industry, the free version is a great way to learn.

I’ve also found Houdini far superior to Blender, and the dynamics and particles are absolutely amazing. Blender is years if not decades away from getting to Houdini’s level. Houdini’s shading system, programmable shading language (VEX), digital asset creation, muscle system, procedural work flow, and pretty much everything blows Blender away. And for what I want to do (production) I need powerful applications that can do the job fast as well as being a marketable job skill.

Q: I’m using Windows Media Player and some of the videos look REALLY bad, and I can’t make out much of what’s going on at all.
A: Yeah, I’ve seen that too. I’ve also tried replaying the videos later and they look fine. I have no idea why this is. I have found that playing on non-media player software (like VLC) plays everything fine all the time. So if a video looks really bad on media player, try VLC.

Q: You have a lot of videos and you keep adding some. With my internet connection, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to download them all without having to wait months!
A: I can understand the dilemma and I don’t want anyone to feel that they can’t learn something just because they might be on dial-up. Depending on where you are, I might be able to burn all the videos to CD/DVD and send them to you in non-ceremonial garb (a disk with a sharpie written title and an old jewel case).

Q: I noticed that on the longer Blender videos, the audio is ahead of what’s displayed on the screen. It makes it a bit hard to follow.
A: You’re right, it does do that, and it was only after making a lot of videos that I realized what the cause was (using mp3 as the audio). I hope you can tolerate this annoyance. I think using mp3 as the audio was good at the time since it reduces the file size a great deal, and in my opinion, smaller file size for video tutorials is a top priority. Later video use different audio compression, and though larger in file size, no longer suffer from this syncing issue.

Q: You mention the CVS/SVN next to the version of Blender you use sometimes. What exactly does that mean?
A: The CVS (Concurrent Versions System) or SVN (Subversion) is what’s used to make additions/corrections to Blender’s source code, so in a way it is a beta that’s changing daily. We can take this updated source and make Blender with it so it will have newer features than the official release. If you are interested to see what changes are made to the SVN, there is a SVN logs mailing list which you can find here. Using an SVN build also means that the build made from the SVN source code may have some bugs that haven’t been addressed, features that haven’t been fully implemented, or features that might not make it to the next release.