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.
