Chinaski

I tried a Houdini demo a while back because I was really wanting more control in my particle work.
Unfortunately, I could get Houdini to crash rather frequently from doing simple tutorials.
I have a very low tolerance for crashing applications.
Perhaps it's gotten better since then.

-m

Give it another shot. I find Houdini to be very stable. A lot of the stability is related to your OS and graphics card. Houdini has some very specific requirements, and the lower end cards and older OS's just can't handle the program that well.

It's been awhile since I've seen it, but I recall Mirrormask being a completely "designed" film. Not too bad of a story, either. Not really motion graphics, but not necessarily a Hollywood style fx or animated film.

For what it's worth, the techniques described in this video are the best way to go about doing clouds (sorry, not in C4D's domain) that I've seen:

http://cmivfx.com/tu...oudini Fractals

I recently did some pretty cool cloud work on a project using the volume displacement technique. Hopefully I can post some of it in a month or so...

Some other information (siggraph papers) here:
http://tessendorf.org/reports.html

Was not expecting to see my name on the board this morning... Thanks for the mention, Firemind! I know Jake used to be on the board. Not sure about David. I'm still around, lurking, but I almost never contribute to online discussions any more - either here or on cgtalk.

Anyway, Bradley (gmunk) has some incredible process videos he cut together of all the work. I know he presented them at FITC. Hopefully, he'll get to show them online soon. As cool as the stuff in the film was, there's an incredible amount of awesome work done by the graphics team that did not end up in the film. I was only on for 3 months - Bradley, Jake, and David were there for the better part of a year, so those guys really deserve the lion's share of the credit. And, of course, Josh Nimoy, wrote some incredible processing apps that became the design backbone of a lot of the graphics work, as well.

I'm glad to hear people like the work. It was a once in a lifetime experience and an incredibly rewarding project to work on