Often the transition from another 3D application to the procedural world of Houdini can be bumpy for those who have been accustomed to working largely in another single CG program.  One reason is that different applications have different strong points and offer varying methodologies to get to similar rendered end results in the final frame, and many artist may end up viewing the general concepts in 3D CG as filtered through the specific program they had practiced in.  Although the first 500 hrs in any program is always the hardest, for those who may have been using another app for 5 or even 10 or more years, those first 500 hours are a distant memory and a drastically different interface can be alienating and have a 3D app like Houdini dismissed as frustrating because familiar menus and GUIs may not be presented in the same way as accustomed to.

These days if an artist knows only one app, its likely going to be Autodesk’s Maya.  Maya has its strong points but very few would argue proceduralism and the hypergraph as an interactive node/DAG as amongst them.  The hypergraph has long been an outdated node editor and lack simple functionality such as an easy way to quickly wire dependency nodes. While it seems this will be addressed by Autodesk in the near future (hopefully), in the 10 some what odd years since its introduction, for similar functionality with equally limited interaction, many have become accustomed to the Outliner as a central part of daily workflow, scene navigation, and object selection.

This series of posts will look closer at a little GUI floater I affectionately call The “FauxLiner” — an Outliner-like navigation and selection interface. We are going to look at why it is constructed the way it is, the process of how to derive the actual script (which will hopefully hint to how to make other GUIs using similar techniques), and caveats in its use as well as similarities and differences with the Outliner presented in Maya. While I firmly believe that trying to make one CG aplication present itself in terms of another purely for the sake of reducing a learning curve wiil result in losing much of the power and robustness present natively and being side-stepped, in this case, it does have a couple of strong points:

• An Outliner-like GUI will make the transition easier and less alienating (as its so central to many artists workflow)

• Although it presents no way to show or manipulate relationships beyond hierarchical, Maya’s Outliner does make an adept selection tool where objects from multiple levels of the heirarchy can be represented and selcted in a single location.

• The above in terms of Houdini would be extremely useful when creating bundles or processing node selections via scipts, where its easier not to open multiple network panes.

So while I discourage the use of FauxLiner as a way to avoid learning how to deal with the more powerful and controllable procedural node interface, it does make a good example of a GUI that may be needed to move a group of artists into unfamiliar territory easier, as well as adding a powerful selection system to our tool arsenal. Lets move forward and look at why we will be constructing this Floater in the manner outlined in part 3. Onward to part 2 -Why.